RUME 27
2025
Alexandria, Virginia
Conceptual Chunking and Algebraic Proofs
Page: 1359
Research in cognitive psychology identifies chunking as one of the driving information- processing mechanisms in human cognition. Conceptual chunking, a term specific to Halford’s relational complexity theory, provides theoretical insights into what constitutes chunking. Specifically, conceptual chunking explains the chunk formation as the result of temporal suppression of relations between the items within the chunk. In this article, I present the analysis of two undergraduate students’ proofs from the relational complexity theoretical perspective. Preliminary results suggest that conceptual chunking can help describe students’ mathematics and explain some of their difficulties related to proving algebraic conjectures.