Collaborative Research: ECR DBER DCL: Extending a Theoretical Model for Undergraduate Students' Reflection and Abstraction of Proof Structures in Transition to Proofs Courses

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This project will build upon promising teaching experiments that have already been conducted to develop theory about how students develop understandings of logical structure when learning mathematical proof. The project will begin with an initial model of students' Reflection and Abstraction of Proof Structures based on findings from existing studies and will develop and extend this model through a series of new teaching experiments. In the third year of the project, the model will be used to analyze students in classrooms. At the heart of this approach is helping students apprehend the questions of logic as they abstract their own mathematical activity to address those questions. The project will organically develop insights into students' content-general learning of logical relations as it emerges from within their content-specific reasoning about the specific mathematical relations.Though engaging in mathematical proof is a central part of an undergraduate mathematics course of study, and the body of research on student learning in this arena is burgeoning, there do not exist research-based learning goals for the Transition to Proof courses being offered by many mathematics departments. Using grounded theory, this project will conduct teaching experiments with Calculus 3 students and analyze recordings of these sessions to refine and extend a constructivist theory of how learning occurs. The concept of abstraction and other constructs from Piaget will be prominent. This project is supported by the EHR Core Research (ECR) program, which supports work that advances fundamental research on STEM learning and learning environments, broadening participation in STEM, and STEM workforce development.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.