2021 Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education Reports
2021
N/A
Student Mathematical Reasoning and Construction in a Digital Environment with Regard to Conceptions of Circles
Page: 283
This study addresses what students’ conceptions of circles are and how students’ interaction with a digital environment influences their development of those conceptions. Two undergraduates from calculus 1 courses participated in exploratory teaching interviews for two one-hour sessions in fall 2019. In this study, we focus on moments in which the students’ mathematical reasoning in regard to circles was on display. The two students demonstrated similar conceptions of and construction of circles on a physical medium at the start of Day 1. However, they interacted differently with the digital environment in the rest of the teaching interviews. Consequently, their conceptions at the end of Day 2 were markedly different. We will discuss the progression of each student and how their interactions with the digital environment influenced their conceptions of circles, paying particular attention to the students’ reasoning throughout.