How Mathematicians Obtain Conviction: Implications for Mathematics Instruction and Research on Epistemic Cognition
By Keith Weber, Matthew Inglis, Juan Pablo Mejía-Ramos. 2014
88 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The received view of mathematical practice is that mathematicians gain certainty in mathematical assertions by deductive evidence rather than empirical or authoritarian evidence. This assumption has influenced mathematics instruction where students are expected to justify assertions with deductive arguments rather than by checking the assertion with specific examples or appealing to authorities. In this article, we argue that the received view about mathematical practice is too simplistic; some mathematicians sometimes gain high levels of conviction with empirical or authoritarian evidence and sometimes do not gain full conviction from the proofs that they read. We discuss what implications this might have, both for mathematics instruction and theories of epistemic cognition.
Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Education
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2a486ccb07c011d8db0a63c072d76a7ed0325aef
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In Developmental and Educational Psychology
- Rebekah F. Duke
- Brian M. Cartiff
- E. G. Peterson
- J. Cohen
- Jeffrey Alan Greene
- Ernesto Panadero
- A. Efklides
- Roger Azevedo
In Education
Citations in the corpus
- A Case for Domain-Specific Curiosity in Mathematics (2019, background): “Awareness of Gaps Increased conceptual knowledge and epistemic competence provides an expanded sense of what mathematics is and the types of problems that can be addressed through mathematics (Richland et al. 2012; Weber et al. 2014).”
- A Meta-Analytic Review of the Relationship Between Epistemic Cognition and Academic Achievement (2018, background): “Some researchers have proposed models of epistemic cognition with strong disciplinary grounding (e.g., Elby & Hammer, 2010; Hammer, 1994; Lee, Goldman, Levine, & Magliano, 2016; Weber et al., 2014).”