PROCEEDINGS OF THE 17TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2014
Denver, Colorado
An Origin Of Prescriptions For Our Mathematical Reasoning (Long Paper)
Page: 312
To build a supplementary theory from which we can derive a practical way of fostering inquiring minds in mathematics, this paper proposes a theoretical perspective that is compatible with existing ideas in mathematics education (radical constructivism, social constructivism, APOS theory, David Tall’s framework, the framework of embodied cognition, new materialist ontologies). We focus on the fact that descriptive and prescriptive statements can be treated simultaneously, and consider both descriptive and instantiated models in our minds. This indicates that descriptive statements in mathematics come from our descriptions of models, and prescriptive statements come from the instantiatedness of the instantiated models and non-existence of counterexample. As a practical suggestion from the proposed perspective, we point out that careful communication is needed so that students do not recognize the refutation of their arguments as a denial of their way of mathematical thinking.