Mathematics as a Constructive Activity - Learners Generating Examples

This book explains and demonstrates the teaching strategy of asking learners to construct their own examples of mathematical objects. The authors show that the creation of examples can involve transforming and reorganizing knowledge and that, although this is usually done by authors and teachers, if the responsibility for making examples is transferred to learners, their knowledge structures can be developed and extended. A multitude of examples to illustrate this is provided, spanning primary, secondary, and college levels. Readers are invited to learn from their own past experience augmented by tasks provided in the book, and are given direct experience of constructing examples through a collection of many tasks at many levels. Classroom stories show the practicalities of introducing such shifts in mathematics education. The authors examine how their approach relates to improving the learning of mathematics and raise future research questions.

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