PROCEEDINGS OF THE 20TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2017
San Diego, California
Building a cognitive model for symmetry: How well does an existing framework fit?
Page: 1544
Symmetry has been found to be a rich and natural context for developing group theory (Larsen,2009), yet the existing literature offers little insight on the complex cognitive processes in thisdomain. This poster will describe an attempt to use a pre-existing cognitive model of a student’sunderstanding of symmetry, to help analyze the data from a recent teaching experiment aimed atexploring the development of one undergraduate student’s understanding of symmetry. Weshare the ways in which the existing model accurately describes the student’s cognitiveprocesses associated with symmetry and also the places in which the model fell short incapturing the complexity of the student’s thinking.Keywords: