Offering explanations is a central part of teaching mathematics, and understanding those explanations is a vital activity for learners. Given this, it is natural to ask what makes a good mathematical explanation. This question has received surprisingly little attention in the mathematics education literature, perhaps because the field has no…

The literature reports that students have difficulties connecting different meanings, multiple representations of the derivative, and performing reversibility processes between representations of f and f'. The research goal is to analyze the mathematical connections that university students establish when solving tasks that involve the graphs of f…

In university mathematics education, students do not simply learn mathematics but are shaped and shape themselves into someone new - mathematicians. In this study, we focus on the becoming of "dis"abled mathematical subjects. We explore the importance of abilities in the processes of being and becoming in university mathematics. Our…

Our study aims to determine how Habermas' construct of rationality can serve to identify and interpret the difficulties experienced by university students in the mathematical problem-solving process. To this end, a problem which required modelling and solving a differential equation was used. The problem-solving processes of university students…

Non-mathematics specialists' competence and confidence in mathematics in their disciplines have been highlighted as in need of improvement. We report from a collaborative, developmental research project which explores the conjecture that greater integration of mathematics and biology in biology study programs, for example through engaging students…

Motivated by the observation that formal logic answers questions students have not yet asked, we conducted exploratory teaching experiments with undergraduate students intended to guide their reinvention of truth-functional definitions for basic logical connectives. We intend to reframe the relationship between reasoning and logic by showing how…

Although counting problems are easy to state and provide rich, accessible problem-solving situations, there is much evidence that students struggle with solving counting problems correctly. With combinatorics (and the study of counting problems) becoming increasingly prevalent in K-12 and undergraduate curricula, there is a need for researchers to…

A challenge in mathematics education research is to coordinate different analyses to develop a more comprehensive account of teaching and learning. We contribute to these efforts by expanding the constructs in Cobb and Yackel's (Educational Psychologist 31:175-190, 1996) interpretive framework that allow for coordinating social and individual…

It is widely recognized that purely cognitive behavior is extremely rare in performing mathematical activity: other factors, such as the affective ones, play a crucial role. In light of this observation, we present a reflection on the presence of affective and cognitive factors in the process of proving. Proof is considered as a special case of…

The main objective of this paper is to apply the onto-semiotic approach to analyze the mathematical concept of different coordinate systems, as well as some situations and university students' actions related to these coordinate systems. The identification of objects that emerge from the mathematical activity and a first intent to describe an…