A4 Refereed article in a conference publication
A sixth-grade student’s growth in understanding written proof texts: Pre- and post-interview analyses of a teaching experiment study
Authors: Dilberoğlu Merve, Çakıroğlu Erdinç, Haser Çiğdem
Editors: Jeremy Hodgen, Eirini Geraniou, Giorgio Bolondi, Federica Ferretti
Conference name: Congress of the European Society for Research in Mathematics Education
Publication year: 2022
Book title : Proceedings of the Twelfth Congress of the European Society for Research in Mathematics Education (CERME 12)
Series title: Proceedings of the Twelfth Congress of the European Society for Research in Mathematics Education
First page : 159
Last page: 166
eISBN: 979-1-22-102537-8
Web address : https://hal.science/hal-03746872v2
This study aims to describe a 6th-grade student’s progress in understanding written proof texts through participating in an individual teaching experiment. The same task was administered to the student twice in an interview setting, before and a year after the teaching experiment. The student was asked to evaluate four arguments aimed to prove a given conjecture. While in the pre-interview, the student accepted all four arguments based on her Naïve Experience; in the post-interview, she rejected empirical arguments and looked for General Procedures (or Abstract Structures) that necessarily apply to the whole set of numbers under investigation. In the post-interview, spontaneous changes occurred in the student’s understanding of the given arguments after she constructed her own proof for the same conjecture. Instructional design elements used in the teaching experiment might have facilitated her understanding of the structure of deductive proof texts.