Instructional Identities of Geometry Students

Abstract

In this paper we inspect the hypothesis that geometry students may be oriented toward how the teacher will evaluate them as students or otherwise oriented to how their work will give them opportunities to do mathematics. The results reported here are based on a mixed-methods analysis of twenty-two interviews with high school geometry students. In these interviews students respond to three different tasks that presented students with an opportunity to do a proof. Students’ responses are coded according to a scheme based on the hypothesis above. Interviews are also coded using a quantitative linguistic ratio that gauges how prominent the teacher was in the students’ opinions about the viability of these proof tasks. These scores were used in a cluster analysis that yielded three student profiles that we characterize using composite profiles. These profiles highlight the different ways that students can experience proof in the geometry classroom.