PROCEEDINGS OF THE 15TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION (Vol 2)
2012
Portland, Oregon
Reinvention Six Months Later: The Case of Megan
Page: 2-109
This research is a part of a larger project to gain insights into how calculus students might come to understand formal limit definitions. For this study, a pair of students participated in a guided reinvention teaching experiment where they had to wrestle with and resolve many problems in creating a formal sequence convergence definition. Six months after the initial teaching experiment, the students returned for individual interviews in which they were both asked to reproduce their sequence convergence definition. In this paper, we highlight one student’s activities to recreate this definition. The definition was not immediately recalled, but instead, particular phrases and relationships were remembered. Furthermore, problems were re- engaged, and we claim that because of prior experiences with these problems, solutions were more readily available and reconstruction was thereby quickened.