PROCEEDINGS OF THE 17TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2014
Denver, Colorado
Proof Conceptions of College Calculus Students
Page: 708
There has been “increasing awareness that reasoning is central to mathematics and mathematics learning” (Yackel & Hanna, 2003, p. 227) among education researchers, which raises questions about student conceptions of reasoning, argumentation and mathematical proof. Mathematicians and mathematics education researchers have consistently asserted the crucial roles deductive reasoning and proof play in discovering, communicating, verifying, understanding, and systematizing mathematics (Hanna, 2000; Ko, 2008; Thurston, 1998). In response to the many affirmations of the importance of proof for learning and understanding mathematics, there has been extensive study of students’ conceptions of mathematical proof, their abilities to construct and understand proofs, and the frequency with which inductive evidence is accepted as sufficient verification of mathematical conjectures (Bell, 1976; Healy & Hoyles, 2000; Ko, 2008; Stylianides, 2009; Varghese, 2009).