Students don’t necessarily arrive at University with the skills they need to communicate maths well. Particularly in England, the structure of the A Level means that they have very little incentive to slow down and write careful accounts of the process, justifying each step: the focus is more on getting as many marks as possible, by doing lots of calculations quickly.
By the time they leave University, for careers in academia or elsewhere, we’d like them to be much better at written communication. Explaining and justifying the highly technical steps of a proof is one of the skills that makes maths graduates great employees, as well as well rounded human beings.
So how do our students move from one perspective to the other? What do we do to encourage them to make this shift in perspective: do we just expect it to happen naturally, or are we actively teaching them to be better writers?
I’m really interested in these questions. Currently I’m exploring the idea that peer assessment could help them along the path, but I’m also open to other ideas about how we can better help them to develop these important skills.