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Book Review: What Is A Mathematical Concept? Edited By Elizabeth De Freitas, Nathalie Sinclair, And Alf Coles, Brendan P. Larvor
Book Review: What Is A Mathematical Concept? Edited By Elizabeth De Freitas, Nathalie Sinclair, And Alf Coles, Brendan P. Larvor
Journal of Humanistic Mathematics
This is a review of What is a Mathematical Concept? edited by Elizabeth de Freitas, Nathalie Sinclair, and Alf Coles (Cambridge University Press, 2017). In this collection of sixteen chapters, philosophers, educationalists, historians of mathematics, a cognitive scientist, and a mathematician consider, problematise, historicise, contextualise, and destabilise the terms ‘mathematical’ and ‘concept’. The contributors come from many disciplines, but the editors are all in mathematics education, which gives the whole volume a disciplinary centre of gravity. The editors set out to explore and reclaim the canonical question ‘what is a mathematical concept?’ from the philosophy of mathematics. This review comments …
Changing The Order Of Mathematics Test Items: Helping Or Hindering Student Performance?, Kristin T. Kennedy, Allison G. Butler
Changing The Order Of Mathematics Test Items: Helping Or Hindering Student Performance?, Kristin T. Kennedy, Allison G. Butler
Journal of Humanistic Mathematics
This paper recounts an experiment by a mathematics professor who primarily teaches mathematics majors. The main question explored is whether the ordering of the questions makes a difference as to how students perform in a test. More specifically we focus here on the following research questions:\ (1) Does arranging a math test with easy-to-hard items versus hard-to-easy items impact student performance? and (2) If so, does item order impact male and female mathematics majors and non-majors in unique ways? We examine data collected over multiple semesters with several different classes. We find that for most of the mathematics students who …