Publication 1373

Excerpt: If the goal of the teacher’s guidance is to generate understanding, rather than train specific performance, his task will clearly be greatly facilitated if that goal can be represented by an explicit model of the concepts and operations that we assume to be the operative source of mathematical competence. More important still, if students are to taste something of the mathematician’s satisfaction in doing mathematics, they cannot be expected to find it in whatever rewards they might be given for their performance but only through becoming aware of the neatness of fit they have achieved in their own conceptual construction.

Key words: cognition, education