Instructors' Orientation on Mathematical Meaning

Students often ask "when is this ever going to be useful?", "why are we doing this?", etc. when speaking about mathematics. If we take this as a question about 'meaningfulness', how can instructors respond and how do they even understand the terms 'meaningful' and 'meaning'? My dissertation looked at how college instructors see their instruction as meaningful or not. Drawing on social and cognitive perspectives of learning, I define four ways to think of what's 'meaningful' about mathematics. From a cognitive perspective, instructors can understand 'meaningful' as mathematical understanding versus understanding the significance of mathematics. From a social perspective where meaning is taken as the experiences of everyday life within communities, teachers can understand 'meaningful' as anything that engages students in practices the mathematics community engage in versus practices non-mathematics communities engage in (e.g. pushing computation or critical thinking as a means for maintaining social hierarchies). Using these four conceptions to categorize instructors' goals, this work focuses on how four undergraduate mathematics instructors thought of their instruction as meaningful and contextual and background factors that influenced those views.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Level thesis:degree_level

doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Mathematics

Department dc:contributor.department

Mathematics

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2021

Author dc:creator

• Chowdhury, Ahsan Habib

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Johnson, Estrella

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Norton, Anderson H. III
• Wawro, Megan
• Wilkins, Jesse L. M.

• Meaningful
• Relevance
• Usefulness
• Instruction
• Undergraduate Mathematics

Statement dc:rights

• Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Dc Identifier Other

vt_gsexam:30383

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/103811