PROCEEDINGS OF THE 21ST ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2018
San Diego, California
Investigating Students’ Meta-Level Object-Reflections and Discourse-Reflections: The Provocative Power of Primary Historical Sources
Page: 1432
We discuss research based on Sfard’s theory of mathematics as a discourse, which we used to investigate the potential of engagement with primary historical sources for motivating undergraduate students to participate in and accept new mathematical discourses. This preliminary report focuses on characterizing the nature of students’ participation in mathematical discourse in their written work on primary source projects (PSPs), as well as the question of what constitutes evidence of students’ noticing of meta-level rules in that work. We present our analysis of a brief excerpt from one PSP, and provide an analysis of two student work samples to exhibit students’ object- and discourse-reflections at the meta-level.