This paper focuses on elementary school students' use of mathematically-based (MB) and practically-based (PB) explanations. The mathematical context used in this study is multiplication. Two issues are discussed. The first issue is a comparison between MB and PB explanations used by students before they are formally introduced to multiplication in…

The aim of the study (Johnsen Hoines 2002) reported here was to shed light on the process through which student teachers express and interpret their understandings about mathematical notions and thereby gain insight into them. This paper focuses on how students cooperate and move between different ways of understandings. It emphases in particular…

The paper looks into visualisation in learning mathematics from three perspectives: It starts from a discussion what it takes to make a sign, an inscription on the blackboard, on paper or on a computer screen to an image. Here we will look into the question of "similarity" and point to the possibility of having different perspectives on the same…

Vygotsky posed a variety of meaningful ideas for education in his short life. This paper focuses on everyday concepts and mathematical concepts or scientific concepts from his theory, reorganizing these ideas according to a new idea of sublated concepts. Using a series of interviews from a third grade fraction class in Japan, the paper discusses…

In this paper we put forward a theoretical position that, in cognitive terms, a differentiation should be made between a correspondence and a function. Important in understanding this difference is the role of an assignation rule; the correspondence acts as a way to identify a rule in context, whilst the function accommodates the rule in a more…

The ability of students to interpret from, represent mathematical problems in, and interact with, a number of differing representations appears to be a crucial part of understanding mathematical concepts. Here we consider the role of representation in student understanding of derivative and present an outline framework for determining its…

This paper presents an initial attempt to define structure sense for high school algebra and to test part of this definition. A questionnaire was distributed to 92 eleventh grade students in order to identify those who use structure sense. Presence and absence of brackets was examined to see how they affect use of structure sense. The overall use…

It is claimed that, since mathematics is essentially a self-contained system, mathematical objects may best be described as "abstract-apart." On the other hand, fundamental mathematical ideas are closely related to the real world and their learning involves empirical concepts. These concepts may be called "abstract-general" because they embody…

The article focuses on a specific method of constructing the concept of function. The core of this method is a didactic model that plays two roles together--on the one hand a role of a model of the concept of function and on the other hand a role of a model of physical phenomena that functions can represent. This synergy of modeling situations and…

The main purpose of this paper is to describe the answers given by adults without primary schooling to different ratio-and rate-comparison tasks. The framework and the analysed data are part of an ongoing research, in which the responses of subjects of different ages and schoolings are studied. The behaviour of quasi-illiterate adults could throw…

In this paper seventh-grade pupils' ways of handling aspects of probability have been investigated. The aspects in question were embedded in a dice game, based on the total of two dice. Four different set-ups of dice were included in the situation in which they were up to explore optimal strategies for winning the game. How children understand…

In this paper, we present a didactic analysis of the mathematical concept of implication under three points of view: sets, formal logic, deductive reasoning. For this study, our hypothesis is that most of the difficulties and mistakes, as well in the use of implication as in its understanding, are due to the lack of links in education between…

In this paper, I describe how undergraduates can develop their understanding of the concept of proof by viewing the act of proving as a procedure. Such undergraduates first understand proof as an algorithm, or a step-by-step mechanical prescription for proving certain types of statements. The students can then condense this algorithm into a…

This article shows that the recognition of the dualities in equality (operator-equivalent) of the minus sign (unary-binary) and the zero (nullity-totality) during the transitional process from arithmetic to algebra by 12-13 year-old students constitutes a possible way to achieve the extension of the natural number domain to the integers. (Contains…

School students' intuitive concepts of infinity are gained from personal experiences and in many cases the tacit models built up by them are inconsistent. The paper describes and analyses a series of tasks which were developed to enable the researchers to look into the mental processes used by students when they are thinking about infinity and to…