RUME 28
2026
Alexandria, Virginia
Parsing Students’ Decision-Making During Analogical Reasoning: A Multi-Constraint Approach
Page: 583
General theories of analogy dictate that connections can be made between virtually any two domains, thus suggesting an extremely large number of analogies that one might observe. Unsurprisingly, some analogies are of course more useful than others. How then do students come to observe “useful” analogies? Multi-constraint theory is one such avenue for exploring questions such as these. In this contributed report, I adopt a multi-constraint approach to parsing students’ analogical reasoning with the goal of uncovering how certain choices are made when developing ring-theoretic analogies to group-theoretic structures. Analysis revealed that the participants exhibited variations in emphasis of analogical constraints during their reasoning in three ways: (a) adhering to basic structure, (b) adhering to conceptual structure, and (c) flouting constraints to advance exploration. Implications for the teaching and learning of abstract algebra and curriculum development are discussed.