D'Ambrosio B. S., Kastberg S. E., & Viola dos Santos J. R. (Mar 2010). Learning from student approaches to algebraic proofs. Mathematics Teacher, 103(7), 489-495.
Teachers need to help students understand the purpose of proofs and how to format their arguements. The authors spends most of this article examining student's proofs. They believe that by observing student's work we can find out what holes are in their understanding. They took 9 different examples from students and talked about how students simply aren't understanding how to put together a proof.
Students aren't being taught how to approach a proof in the correct way. From examining the nine different examples it is obvious that students aren't understanding the purpose of a proof and what they should be doing. I experienced this in my classes in high school and am still experiencing it in my current proofs class. Often what needs to be proved appears obvious to students, but this isn't the purpose of a proof. By examining how students appoach a proof, it will help teachers better understand how to fill in the holes of a student's knowledge.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I really liked your ideas in the second paragraph. The first paragraph was a great summary. I liked how concise you were, but still said enough that it made sense. As far as the structure I couldn't quite find your critique of the article and the author's argument, or of their presentation of the argument. But definitely a great job!
ReplyDeleteI liked this blog. I thought you did a good job of being concise making it very easy to understand. I also liked that you stuck to one point and kept a professional tone. I think the closest I could come to a critique of this would be that I think you could more fully explore the main idea of the article. I think that you summarize what he did, but it might help to add more about the authors opinions on how looking at students work helps teachers.
ReplyDeleteI thought your summary of the paper was a little too short, I didn't get a feel for what was really going on within it. However, I think that given what you've told me about the paper I think I understand the gist of it. I would have liked to see one of the 9 examples though and more analysis of the papers content that way but maybe that's just me.
ReplyDeleteThis was similar to my paper where it is proposed that students become exposed to proofs at an earlier age; this may be one solution to helping students understand proofs more. That's one idea.
Thanks for the blog overall though!
I felt that the last paragraph could have had a clearer topic sentence.
ReplyDeleteAlso, what were some of the examples like? And what is the purpose of a proof?