Measuring Geometry Teachers' Willingness to Expand Proof Practices

• In Event: Teacher Knowledge and Teacher Practice in Mathematics

Abstract

Based on data collected from the administration of a multimedia questionnaire to a nationally-distributed sample of secondary mathematics teachers, we investigated such teachers’ stance on the norm of high school geometry instruction that the teacher is responsible for providing the propositions (‘given’ and ‘prove’ statements) that students are asked to prove. We found that, although these teachers tended to react negatively to breaches of the norm, they favored breaches that involved students in proposing alternate given and/or prove statements as long as the final decision of what proposition will be proved was left to the teacher. This suggests that teachers are willing to expand the ways they support students in doing proofs under the right circumstances.

Authors

• Mollee Changshu Shultz, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

• Patricio G. Herbst, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

• Nicolas Boileau, University of Michigan

• Ander Willard Erickson, University of Washington - Tacoma