Secondary teachers’ differing views on who should learn proving and why

Abstract

Reasoning-and-proving is viewed by many scholars to be a crucial part of students’ mathematical experiences in secondary school. There is scholarly debate, however, about the necessity of formal proving. In this study, we investigated the notion of “proof for all” from the perspective of secondary mathematics teachers and we analyzed, using the framework of practical rationality, the justifications they gave for whether or not all students should learn proof. Based on interviews with twenty-one secondary teachers from a socioeconomically-diverse set of schools, we found that teachers do not share the same opinion on who should learn proving but they expressed obligations toward individual student learning as justifications both for teaching proving to all students and for not teaching proving to some students.