This paper introduces the concept of logical consistency in students' thinking in mathematical contexts. We present the Logical in-Consistency (LinC) instrument as a valuable assessment tool designed to examine the prevalence and types of logical inconsistencies among undergraduate students' evaluation of mathematical statements and accompanying…

Reasoning with mathematics plays an important role in university students' learning throughout their courses in the scientific disciplines, such as physics. In addition to understanding mathematical concepts and procedures, physics students often must mathematize physical constructs in terms of their associated mathematical structures and…

Analogy has played an important role in developing modern mathematics. However, it is unclear to what extent students are granted opportunities to productively reason by analogy. This article proposes a set of lessons for introducing topics in ring theory that allow students to engage with the process of reasoning by analogy while exploring new…

This phenomenology research aims to examine prospective elementary mathematics teachers' proving and proof evaluation and their thoughts on convincing according to proof type and argument type. The participants were eight prospective teachers. The data collection tools were semi-structured group interviews, interviews video recordings and the…

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…

This article offers the construct "unitizing predicates" to name mental actions important for students' reasoning about logic. To unitize a predicate is to conceptualize (possibly complex or multipart) conditions as a single property that every example has or does not have, thereby partitioning a universal set into examples and…

In this paper, we elaborate the "seeds of algebraic thinking" perspective, drawing upon Knowledge in Pieces as a heuristic epistemological framework. We argue that students' pre-instructional experiences in early childhood lay the foundation for algebraic thinking and are a largely untapped resource in developing students' algebraic…

It is widely agreed that knowing how prospective teachers develop analogical reasoning in solving problems is essential. Problem solving is specific domain that requires particular ways of analogical reasoning skill. The purposes of this study was to reveal the development of analogical reasoning and strategies used by a prospective teacher. The…

Children display an early sensitivity to implicit proportions (e.g., 1 of 5 apples vs. 3 of 4 apples), but have considerable difficulty in learning the explicit, symbolic proportions denoted by fractions (e.g., "1/5" vs. "3/4"). Theoretically, reducing the gap between representations of implicit versus explicit proportions…

In this exploratory descriptive study, changes in one cohort's responses to an authentic statistical investigation at the commencement of years 3 and 4 were analysed. Forty-four students made predictions by interpreting a data table of historical monthly temperatures, represented these data and explained their reasoning. An Awareness of…

To illustrate primary students' use of argumentation, this study reported on an analysis of elements in argumentation of 168 grade 5 students in Taiwan. This study adopted the van Hiele (vH) model as the main theoretical framework with relevant studies to show the development of argumentation. This study designed a geometric argumentation test…

It is widely assumed within developmental psychology that spontaneously-arising conceptualizations of natural number--those that develop without explicit mathematics instruction--match the formal characterization of natural number given in the Dedekind-Peano Axioms (e.g., Carey, 2004; Leslie et al., 2008; Rips et al., 2008). Specifically,…

Task-relevant actions can facilitate mathematical thinking, even for complex topics, such as mathematical proof. We investigated whether such cognitive benefits also occur for action predictions. The action-cognition transduction (ACT) model posits a reciprocal relationship between movements and reasoning. Movements--imagined as well as real ones…

Mathematical reasoning is gaining increasing significance in mathematics education. It has become part of school curricula and the numbers of empirical studies are growing. Researchers investigate mathematical reasoning, yet, what is being under investigation is diverse--which goes along with a diversity of understandings of the term reasoning.…

This study aims to see the influence of infusion learning strategy on students' mathematical argumentation, in particular to those who were prospective math teachers. Method: It used an experimental research design involving 70 respondents. The experimental group implemented an infusion learning strategy, while the control group applied the…