In many advanced mathematics courses, comprehending theorems and proofs is an essential activity for both students and mathematicians. Such activity requires readers to draw on relevant meanings for the concepts involved; however, the ways that concept meaning may shape comprehension activity is currently undertheorized. In this paper, we share a…

Mathematical induction is a powerful method of proof, taught in most undergraduate programs involving mathematics and in secondary schools in some countries. It is also commonly known to be complex and difficult to comprehend. During the last five decades, mathematics education research has produced numerous studies on the learning and teaching of…

Examples play a variety of roles in proving and disproving. Buchbinder and Zaslavsky (2019) have produced an a priori mathematical framework for assessing students' understanding of the role of examples when proving and disproving universal and existential statements. In this paper, I highlight three important aspects that suggest an extension of…

Definitions play an integral role in mathematics and mathematics classes. Yet, expectations for definitions and how they are intended to operate, i.e., mathematical norms for definitions, can remain hidden from students and conflict with other discursive norms, explaining differences in mathematicians' and students' understandings of the nature of…

Instructors manage several tensions as they engage students in defining, conjecturing, and proving, including building on students' contributions while maintaining the integrity of certain mathematical norms. This paper presents a case study of a teacher-researcher who was particularly skilled in balancing these tensions in a laboratory setting.…

Professors in proof-based mathematics courses often intend that the feedback they provide on students' flawed proofs will promote proof comprehension. In this theoretical article, we investigate how such feedback can be formulated. Drawing on Lakatos's process of proof and refutation, we propose the notion of "heuristic refutation…

This study, using a scriptwriting task, examines how 52 Czech pre-service mathematics teachers (PMTs) handled a situation in which a fictional pupil's incorrect reasoning resulted in a correct answer. The participants were asked to imagine and provide a script that reflects how the situation could evolve in response to the pupil's incorrect…

Definitions are an integral aspect of mathematics. In particular, they form the backbone of deductive reasoning and facilitate precision in mathematical communication. However, when multiple non-equivalent definitions for the same term exist, their ability to serve these purposes can be called into question. While ambiguity can be productive, the…

In this paper, we discuss our experience in collaborating with mathematicians to increase their use of active learning pedagogy in a proof-based linear algebra course. The mathematicians we worked with valued using active learning pedagogy to increase student engagement but were reluctant to use active learning pedagogy due to time constraints.…

Previous studies on Bayesian situations, in which probabilistic information is used to update the probability of a hypothesis, have often focused on the calculation of a posterior probability. We argue that for an in-depth understanding of Bayesian situations, it is (apart from mere calculation) also necessary to be able to evaluate the effect of…

Although there is much research exploring students' covariational reasoning, there is less research exploring the ways students can leverage such reasoning to coordinate more than two quantities. In this paper, we describe a system of covariational relationships as a comprehensive image of how two varying quantities, having the same attribute…

We are interested in understanding how university students learn to use programming as a tool for "authentic" mathematical investigations (i.e., similar to how some mathematicians use programming in their research work). The theoretical perspective of the instrumental approach offers a way of interpreting this learning in terms of…

This study examines the influence of teacher collaboration on novice mathematics teachers' professional development through a project in Shanghai focused on creating digital resources for global primary mathematics education. We investigated how two novice teachers' interactions with social resources shaped their didactic praxeologies in lesson…

This study explores ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) students' early algebraic thinking abilities by comparing them to their non-ASD peers. The first aim was to examine whether possible significant differences between ASD and non-ASD students in arithmetic also extend to early algebra. The second aim focused further on early algebraic thinking,…

An important approach for developing children's algebraic thinking involves introducing them to generalized arithmetic at the time they are learning arithmetic. Our aim in this study was to investigate children's attention to and expression of generality with the subtraction-compensation property, as evidence of a type of algebraic thinking known…