Definition
“Argumentation in mathematics education” can mean two things:
- 1.
The mathematical arguments that students and teachers produce in mathematics classrooms
- 2.
The arguments that mathematics education researchers produce regarding the nature of mathematics learning and the efficacy of mathematics teaching in various contexts.
This entry is about the first of these two interpretations.
Mathematics Classrooms and Argumentation
In the context of a mathematics classroom, we will take a “mathematical argument” to be a line of reasoning that intends to show or explain why a mathematical result is true. The mathematical result might be a general statement about some class of mathematical objects or it might simply be the solution to a mathematical problem that has been posed. Taken in this sense, a mathematical argument might be a formal or informal proof, an explanation of how a student or teacher came to make a particular conjecture, how a student or teacher reasoned through a...
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References
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Sriraman, B., Umland, K. (2020). Argumentation in Mathematics Education. In: Lerman, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Mathematics Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15789-0_11
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