RUME 27
2025
Alexandria, Virginia
Examining Subjective Factors Shaping Students’ Combinatorial Thinking
Page: 448
Research on combinatorics education indicates a crucial need in mathematics education to address students’ ways of thinking at a level that benefits a deeper understanding of how students conceptualize counting problems. Attending to the ways in which students approach and interpret counting problems reveals the subjectivity in their decision makings. In this study, I report data from written works submitted by thirty five prospective high school teachers as they considered a disagreement between two possible responses to a combinatorial problem. Defining subjective combinatorics as a subjective aspect of students’ interpretations of sets of outcomes facilitates describing students’ counting activity. I propose subjective combinatorics as a construct to shed light on our understanding of students’ counting activities, focusing on the subjectivity inherent in their combinatorial thinking.