Mathematics lecturers frequently ask questions in their lectures, and these questions presumably play an important role in students’ thinking about and learning of the lecture content. We replicated and developed a coding scheme used in previous research in the US to categorise lecturers’ questions in a sample of 136 lectures given by 24 lecturers at a research-intensive UK university. We found that the coding scheme could be applied reliably, and that factual questions were predominant (as in previous research). We explore differences in the lecturers’ use of questions – both between our UK sample and the previous US work, and between individual lecturers in our sample. We note the presence of strings of related successive questions from the lecturer, which we term ‘question chains’. We explore the nature of these, examine their prevalence, and seek to account for them in terms of the lecturers’ possible intentions.
In this research, we investigated how a summative assessment of creating and sharing metaphors for linear algebra concepts supported undergraduate students’ affective, behavioral, and cognitive engagement. All seven research participants were enrolled in an introductory linear algebra course designed to develop students’ geometric understanding of linear algebra concepts in R2 and R3. Using embodied cognition and an engagement framework, we analyzed students’ written responses and video-taped their focus group discussion. Our findings suggest that this summative assessment (a) privileged mathematical aesthetics and the affective domain of learning, (b) engaged students in binding formal aspects of linear algebra concepts with metaphors that they enacted via embodiment, and (c) was an opportunity to demonstrate learning and higher-order cognition. Thus, illustrating that assessments can focus on aesthetic and affective domains of mathematics while simultaneously integrating serious mathematical cognition. We conclude by offering adaptations of this assessment for other mathematics courses.

