Department of Mathematics Colloquium
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Abstract |
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Both intuitive and formal aspects of limit
concepts have proven difficult for undergraduate students in
lower-division mathematics and introductory proof courses. Guided
reinvention offers students a promising approach for making sense of
these complex, foundational ideas. This talk will include the story of
Megan and Belinda, neither of whom had seen formal limit definitions
previously and yet were able to construct formal definitions of
sequence convergence, series convergence, and pointwise convergence
during a guided reinvention teaching experiment. We will also discuss
efforts taken to scale guided reinvention to the classroom level - is
guided reinvention possible in an Advanced Calculus class? What
complicating factors arise in the classroom that aren't present in the
laboratory?
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