RUME 25
2023
Omaha, Nebraska
The Role of Ritual and Personalization in Students’ Exploration of Subgroup Generation
Page: 1205
We share preliminary results of a commognitive analysis of the participation of twelve undergraduate students in an exploratory subgroup generation activity in an abstract algebra class. We find that while students’ collaborative activity contains markers of both ritualized and explorative participation, their appeals to ritual and personalized formulations of inferences and insights about subgroups serve to broaden access to the conceptual substance of the activity. We discuss a possible asset-oriented interpretation of students’ ritualized activity as an aid to exploration and reflective of the disciplinary activity of professional mathematicians.