Structure sense can be interpreted as an intuitive ability towards symbolic expressions, including skills to perceive, to interpret, and to manipulate symbols in different roles. This ability shows student algebraic proficiency in dealing with various symbolic expressions and is considered important to be mastered by secondary school students for…

Functions are all around us, disguised as actions on concrete objects. Composition of functions, too, is all around us, because these actions can be performed in succession, the output of one serving as the input for the next. In terms of Gray and Tall's (2001) "embodied objects" or Lakoff and Nunez's (2000) "mathematical idea…

The purpose of this research is to investigate students' cognitive behaviour in the subjects of function, limit, and derivative according to gender. The research was conducted with the participation of 67 female and 58 male 11th grade students of Gazi High School in Eskisehir in the academic year 2000/2001. The data were obtained through a test…

To probe beyond declarative knowledge about real numbers in secondary school, the authors interviewed students in Grades 9, 10 and 12. The main question seems to be whether the length of a decimal expansion is "indefinite" or "infinite." It blurs the mental representation of rational numbers as well. (Contains 3 footnotes.) [For complete…