In this pedagogical action research study, we, as post-secondary mathematics teacher educators, built on an existing effort to improve pre-service teachers' mathematical vocabulary understandings by intentionally addressing their struggles related to polygonal area formulas. Utilizing cognitive load theory and Bruner's levels of developmental…

The perception of 3D features from 2D representations depend on their number of salient features, recognizable canonical axes, and orientations. Informed by form-perception literature, we proposed a hexagonal prism as an external reference frame to identify positions of elements in relation to each other and the observer when studying Diels-Alder…

The three localization perspectives--punctual, local and global--initially proposed for functions, are used to study the objects of Analysis. We provide two examples of how they can support mathematical work: computing the tangent to a curve and computing the limit of a function.

We consider here two questions posed by first-year undergraduate students in a statistics tutorial session. These questions are related, and each concerns an aspect of independence in probability. The notion of independence does tend to be a little less intuitive than some of the other elementary probabilistic concepts, thereby providing students…

In this study, we investigate a sample of in-service teachers' professional noticing of slope. The analysis focuses on which elements of students' statements about slope teachers attend to, and how teachers interpreted those elements. Study results suggest that teachers attended to the vocabulary and mathematical focus of students' statements.…

The Action-Process-Object-Schema (APOS) theory is applied to study student understanding of implicit differentiation in the context of functions of one variable. The APOS notions of Schema and schema development in terms of the intra-, inter-, and trans-triad are used to analyze semi-structured interviews with 25 students who had just finished…

It often falls to a physicist to teach a conceptual astronomy course. It is easy to justify a treatment of general relativity in the context of massive stars, black holes, and cosmology. There are a number of good books available to serve as texts or references, including Thorne's "Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous…

When teaching a novel mathematical concept, should we present learners with abstract or concrete examples? In this experiment, we conduct a critical replication and extension of a well-known study that argued for the general advantage of abstract examples (Kaminski, Sloutsky, & Heckler, 2008a). We demonstrate that theoretically motivated yet…

We propose some generalizations of the classical Division Algorithm for polynomials over coefficient rings (possibly non-commutative). These results provide a generalization of the Remainder Theorem that allows calculating the remainder without using the long division method, even if the divisor has degree greater than one. As a consequence we…

The purpose of this note is to describe the mathematics that emanates from the construction of an origami box. We first construct a simple origami box from two rectangular sheets and then discuss some of the mathematical questions that arise in the context of geometry and algebra.

George Spencer-Brown's Laws of Forms was first published in 1969. In the fifty years since its publication, it has influenced mathematicians, scientists, philosophers, and sociologists. Its influence on mathematics education has been negligible. In this paper, I present a brief introduction to the theory and its philosophical underpinnings. And I…

In the first main section of this thesis, I investigate superirreducible polynomials over fields of positive characteristic and also over [set of rational numbers] and [set of integers]. An n-superirreducible polynomial f(x) is an irreducible polynomial that remains irreducible under substitutions f(g(x)) for g of degree at most n. I find…

Previous research has individually assessed parallel analysis and minimum average partial for factor retention in exploratory factor analysis using ordinal variables. The current study is a comprehensive simulation study including the manipulation of eight conditions (type of correlation matrix, sample size, number of variables per factor, number…

The notion or expectation of simplifying final mathematical results remains problematic in that it is ill-defined, tied more closely to algorithmic versus conceptual understanding, and decontextualized from the content, purpose, and application of the mathematics in question. In this article, the authors advocate for a tool-focused view of…

This study offers a comprehensive investigation of 14-15-year-old students' comprehension of non-Euclidean geometries, with a specific focus on the assessment of their understanding through a 15-itemed test. The primary objective of this research is to assess the current state of students' knowledge and proficiency in non-Euclidean geometries and…