What do our students "see" when they "read" a mathematical text?

Speaker:

Giorgio Bolondi, U. of Bolzano, Italy

Abstract:

Since Euclid (and possibly even before) mathematical texts are multimodal texts, where words and figures interact in a subtle way. Many theoretical frameworks have been proposed to frame this interaction.

I will present a research exploring a paradigmatical situation proposed by Fischbein, showing that the linguistic structure of the text of a task impacts on students' behaviour and solving strategy. The complexity of this problems is a good example of why and how  mixed (quantitative+qualitative) methods may be fruitful in mathematics education research.