PROCEEDINGS OF THE 17TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2014
Denver, Colorado
Understanding Students’ Conceptualizations of Logical Tools
Page: 673
While a significant amount of research has been devoted to exploring why university students struggle applying logic, limited work can be found on how students actually make sense of formal logic itself and the logical mechanisms used to communicate logical equivalence. This project borrows the theoretical framework of unitizing and reification, which have been effectively used to explain the types of integrated understanding required to make sense of symbols involved in numerical computation and algebraic manipulation, to investigate students’ conceptualization of truth tables and implication statements. By using a continuum as a framework to analyze the degree to which students’ thinking of each is compartmentalized versus unified, results indicate that students tend to favor one logical mechanism over another, without establishing a holistic view of both or an integrated view of the two together.