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Choose Your Words: Refining What Counts As Mathematical Discourse In Students' Negotiation Of Meaning For Rate Of Change Of Volume, Christine Johnson Jul 2008

Choose Your Words: Refining What Counts As Mathematical Discourse In Students' Negotiation Of Meaning For Rate Of Change Of Volume, Christine Johnson

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to describe how university honors calculus students negotiate meaning and language for conceptually important ideas through mathematical discourse. Mathematical discourse has been recognized as an important topic by mathematics education researchers of various theoretical perspectives. This study is written from a perspective that merges symbolic interactionism (Blumer, 1969) with personal agency (Walter & Gerson, 2007) to assert that human choice reflects, but is not determined by, meanings that are primarily developed through social interaction. The process of negotiation of meaning is identified, described, and analyzed in the discourse of four students and their professor …


A Closer Look At The Crease Length Problem, Sean F. Ellermeyer Apr 2008

A Closer Look At The Crease Length Problem, Sean F. Ellermeyer

Faculty and Research Publications

An optimization problem that appears as an exercise in most modern calculus textbooks is the crease length problem. Here, Ellermeyer provides a solution of the general crease length problem in which all possible foldings of a corner to the opposite edge are taken into account. One of his findings will be that the minimum crease length is never produced by a Case 2 fold and hence that the general crease length problem always yields a different minimum than the constrained problem that is treated in the textbooks. He discovers a criterion that determines which foldings must be performed in order …