DESCRIPTIONS AND MODELS OF STUDENTS' UNDERSTANDING OF MATHEMATICS.
All of us who teach mathematics make decisions every day based on our
descriptions, implicit or explicit, of students' understanding of the mathematics
we teach. The way we present particular material, our responses to
students' questions, the exams we write, and the grades we give are all
based on inferences we make about what they are thinking from the things
they write and say. These inferences and the decisions based on them
are shaped in crucial ways by the informal models and images of mathematical
understanding we hold. In this seminar we will study a number of
papers in which diverse models of students' understanding of mathematics
are presented, and we will analyze various forms of evidence of college
students' mathematical thinking, such as videotape and students' written
work. The purpose here is to understand these authors' models and
to apply them to examples close to our own teaching. In the process,
our own models of students' understanding should become more explicit and
be more clearly articulated as they are brought into contact with the more
formal models found in these papers.