PROCEEDINGS OF THE 15TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION (Vol 2)
2012
Portland, Oregon
A First Look at How Mathematicians Read Mathematics for Understanding
Page: 2-548
As students progress through the college mathematics curriculum, enter graduate school and eventually become practicing mathematicians, reading mathematics textbooks and journal articles appears to comes easier and these readers appear to gain quite a bit from reading mathematics. Previous research has focused on what early college students do as they read and the difficulties they encounter that interfere with understanding what has been read. This preliminary study was designed to help us begin to understand how more advanced readers of mathematics read for understanding. Four faculty members and four graduate students participated in this study and read from a first year graduate textbook in an area of mathematics unfamiliar to each of them. The reading methods of the faculty level mathematicians were all quite similar and were markedly different from all the students the researcher has encountered so far, including the more advanced students in this study.