Séminaire DidaTech

Résumé

Perhaps it is a sign of the maturity of research into the teaching and learning of proof and proving that we are beginning to reflect on what it is we are researching, and whether, as a community, we are successful in communicating our work to each other. Three papers (Godino and Recio 1997, Reid 2001, Balacheff 2002) have been presented in the past seven years exploring the different meaning for “proof” and “proving” used in different research communities within mathematics education. In this seminar I will continue this exploration and suggest that Rosch's (Varela, Thomson & Rosch 1991) “prototype theory” provides a way of considering the category “proof” that may help to clarify communication among researchers.

Références

Balacheff N.(2002) The researcher epistemology: a deadlock from educational research on proof. Fou Lai Lin (ed.) 2002 International Conference on Mathematics - "Understanding proving and proving to understand". Taipei: NSC and NTNU (pp. 23-44). Reprinted in Les cahiers du laboratoire Leibniz, no 109, August 2004, Online at

http://www-leibniz.imag.fr/NEWLEIBNIZ/LesCahiers/Cahier109/ ResumCahier109.html

Godino J. D., Recio A. M. (1997). Meaning of proofs in mathematics education In Pekhonen, Erkki (Ed.), Proceedings of the Twenty-first Conference of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education. (Vol. 2 pp. 313-320). Lahti, Finland.

Reid, D. (2001) Proof, proofs, proving and probing: Research related to proof. Short Oral presentation. In M. van den Heuvel-Panhuizen (Ed.) Proceedings of the Twentieth-Fifth Annual Conference of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education,(Vol. I, p. 360) Utrecht, Netherlands. Online at http://ace.acadiau.ca/~dreid/publications/proof/proof.htm)

Varela, F.J., Thompson, E. & Rosch, E. (1991). The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.