Athina Thoma

• Lecturer at University of Southampton

This paper summarizes in six themes the papers and the posters contributed to the TWG14: University Mathematics Education (UME) at CERME13. Also, we provide an overview of the three thematic discussions and the final concluding session of the group with indications for future research.

In this paper, we report aspects of mathematics undergraduate students' activity when writing a mathematical proof in an interactive theorem prover. The participants, two first-year undergraduate mathematics students, were invited to a series of interviews and asked to engage with a learning resource, the Natural Number Game, designed to introduce...

In this paper, we analyze high school students’ answers to algebraic questions focusing on their use of unnecessary brackets. This is a part of a larger study exploring students’ use and non-use of brackets at various educational levels and on different mathematical topics. Our focus in this paper is on the instances of the use of unnecessary brack...

Programming is becoming increasingly common in mathematics degrees as it is a desirable skill for new graduates. However, research shows that its use is mostly restricted to computational or modelling tasks. This paper reports a study on students' perceptions of and difficulties with Lean, an interactive theorem prover introduced as part of a trans...

Mental brackets constitute an idiosyncratic use of brackets sometimes used to evaluate arithmetic expressions and are closely connected with students’ structure sense. The relevant literature describes the use of mental brackets focusing on primary school students and in the context of arithmetic. Using 181 high school students’ solutions to seven...

Στην εργασία αυτή ερευνούμε τα λάθη και τις παρανοήσεις μαθητών Α΄ και Β΄ Λυκείου σχετικά με την έννοια των σύνθετων κλασμάτων. Συγκεκριμένα εξετάζουμε τις γραπτές λύσεις των μαθητών σε δύο δραστηριότητες που αρχικά ζητούν να μετατραπεί μια ρητή αριθμητική παράσταση σε οριζόντια μορφή και στη συνέχεια να γίνουν οι υπολογισμοί. Η ποιοτική ανάλυσ...

This study reports on first-year Science Education students’ mathematical writing when solving tasks involving functions, logarithms, derivatives, and integrals. The focus of this paper is on students’ use of mental brackets, a concept which up to now has been mainly studied in primary school students’ scripts. When using mental brackets, the stude...

This exploratory study reports on characteristics of proof production and proof writing observed in the work of first-year university students who took part in workshops on the theorem prover LEAN (https:// leanprover.github.io). These workshops were voluntary and offered alongside a transition to proof module in a UK university. Through qualitativ...

MathTASK é um programa de pesquisa e desenvolvimento que engaja professores de matemática em situações de sala de aula desafiadoras e altamente contextualizadas na forma de tarefas (chamadas de mathtasks). As respostas de professores às tarefas revelam seus discursos matemáticos e pedagógicos e abrem oportunidades para articular, considerar e recon...

One more presentation on our project with LEAN!

In this paper, we report findings from a pilot study investigating school students' epistemologies of mathematics by using novel mathematics definitions. Students aged 17 and 18-year-old in Italy and the UK were asked to complete a worksheet that used a numerical approach to determine the sizes of infinite sets and were, then, invited to attend foc...

We explore the transition from school to university through a commognitive (Sfard 2008) analysis of twenty-two students’ examination scripts from the end of year examination of a first year, year-long module on Sets, Numbers, Proofs and Probability in a UK mathematics department. Our analysis of the scripts relies on a preliminary analysis of the t...