PROCEEDINGS OF THE 19TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2016
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Effect of teacher prompts on student proof construction
Page: 1158
Many students have difficulty learning to construct mathematical proofs. In an upper level mathematics course using inquiry based methods, while this is some research on the types of verbal discourse in these courses, there is little, if any, research on teachers’ written comments on students’ work. This paper presents some very preliminary results from ongoing analysis from Morrow’s written prompts on students’ rough drafts of proofs for an Abstract Algebra course. The teacher prompts will initially be analyzed through a framework proposed by Blanton & Stylianou (2014) for verbal discourse and the framework will be modified in the course of the analysis. Can we understand if a type of prompt is “better” in some sense in getting students to reflect on their work and refine their proofs? It is anticipated that teacher prompts in the form of transactive questions are more effective in helping students construct proofs.