Example-generation tasks have been suggested as an effective way to both promote students' learning of mathematics and assess students' understanding of concepts. E-assessment offers the potential to use example-generation tasks with large groups of students, but there has been little research on this approach so far. Across two studies, we…

Learning to interpret data in context is an important educational outcome. To assess students' attainment of this outcome, it is necessary to examine the interplay between their contextual and statistical reasoning. We describe a research method designed to do so. The method draws upon Toulmin's (1958, 2003) model of argumentation for the first…

Though there is an extensive research literature on understanding and assessing individual modeling competencies, less attention has been given to characterizing the social context of the classroom in which modeling occurs. Yet a classroom's culture of modeling--its negotiated system of beliefs and values about the nature of modeling and what…

This paper focuses on teaching and learning the set of real numbers "R" and its completeness property at the university level. It studies, in particular, the opportunities for understanding this property that students are offered in four undergraduate correlative courses in Calculus and Analysis. The theoretical framework used in the study draws…