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Many other studies have researched the benefits of digital manipulatives and digital environments through student completion of tasks and testing. This study intends to research students’ use of the digital tools and manipulatives, along with the students’ interactions with the digital environment. To this end, I conducted exploratory teaching experiments with two calculus I students.
In the exploratory teaching experiments, students were introduced to a GeoGebra application developed by Fischer (2019), which includes instructional videos and corresponding quizzes, as well as exercises and interactive notepads, where students could use digital tools to construct line segments and circles (corresponding to the physical straight-edge and compass). The application built up the students’ foundational knowledge, culminating in the construction and verbal proof of Euclid’s Elements, Proposition 1 (Euclid, 1733).
The central findings of this thesis are the students’ interactions with the digital environment, with observed changes in their conceptions of radii and circles, and in their use of tools. The students were observed to have conceptions of radii as a process, a geometric shape, and a geometric object. I observed the students’ conceptions of a circle change from a geometric shape to a geometric object, and with that change, observed the students’ use of tools change from a measuring focus to a property focus.
I report a summary of the students’ work and classify their reasoning and actions into the above categories, and an analysis of how the digital environment impacts the students’ conceptions. I also briefly discuss the impact of the findings on pedagogy and future research.
This thesis is an extension of previous research done by Roh and Lee (2018). Their research involved the design and implementation of a survey to analyze students’ cognitive inconsistencies. This thesis expands upon this research to interview students who demonstrated logical inconsistencies and evaluates the kinds of struggles students faced while evaluating statements and validating arguments. Three students who demonstrated logical inconsistencies were interviewed and asked to answer questions originally pulled from Roh and Lee’s (2018) survey. This thesis found that there were many aspects of each section of the survey that students had struggled with, including use of intuition, analyzing a proof-by-contradiction that utilized a negated statement, and distrust of alternate proving methods. Overall, these techniques the students used while evaluating statements and validating arguments gives interesting insight into the pedagogy of teaching proofs.