Abstract:
Previous approaches to mathematics knowing and learning have attempted to account for the complexity of students’ individual conceptions of a mathematical concept. Those approaches primarily focused on students’ conceptual development when a mathematical concept comes into being. Recent research insights indicate that some students give meaning not only to states/objects that have a being but also to states/objects that are yet to become. In those cases, conceptual development is not meant to reflect an actual concept (conception-to-concept fit), but rather to create a concept (concept-to-conception fit). It is argued that the process of generating a concept-to-conception fit, in which ideas that express a yet to be realized state of the concept are created, might be better referred to meaning-making than sense-making.
