PROCEEDINGS OF THE 15TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION (Vol 2)
2012
Portland, Oregon
Articulating Students’ Intellectual Needs: A Case of Axiomatizing
Page: 2-604
This study uses qualitative methods to investigate how students’ intellectual needs were articulated in an inquiry-based mathematics bridge course. One of the primary goals of this bridge course was to orient students toward more advanced mathematics by engaging them with an RME- inspired curriculum for learning abstract algebra (Larsen, 2004). Although intellectual need was not the initial object of analysis in this term-long teaching experiment, the teacher-researcher was curious about the nature of some of the student discussions that had taken place during the term. In a retrospective analysis of the teaching experiment, students’ acts of mathematizing were examined and correlated with Harel’s (2011) categories of intellectual need. A preliminary analysis of the data suggests that the act of axiomatizing a mathematical system—in this case, a group—can provide students with many opportunities to articulate and address a variety of intellectual needs.