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Conference paper
Maintaining Conventions and Constraining Abstraction
North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education, pp.518-525
Oct 2015
Abstract
Conventions play an important communicative role in mathematics. Likely due to the complex relationship between conventions and school mathematics, few education researchers have questioned or investigated the consequences of instruction and curricula that primarily, if not unquestionably, maintain conventions. Drawing on Piagetian notions of abstraction and our work with students and teachers, we argue that students' repeated experiences with instruction and curricula that maintain conventions likely constrain students' learning opportunities. We hypothesize that by 'breaking' conventions, educators could better support students in differentiating those aspects of their activity essential to a concept from those that are unessential. We characterize student work on two tasks to illustrate potential relationships between the nature of students' abstractions and what we perceive to be conventions. [For the complete proceedings, see ED583989]
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Details
- Title
- Maintaining Conventions and Constraining Abstraction
- Creators
- Kevin C Moore - University of GeorgiaJason Silverman - Drexel University
- Publication Details
- North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education, pp.518-525
- Conference
- PMENA-37 Proceedings, Thirty-Seventh Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education, 37th (East Lansing, Michigan, United States, 05 Nov 2015–08 Nov 2015)
- Publisher
- North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education
- Number of pages
- 8
- Resource Type
- Conference paper
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- School of Education
- Identifiers
- 991021893586404721