Undergraduate students’ use of deductive arguments to solve 'prove that…' tasks

In this paper we report findings from an investigation of 222 proof attempts produced by 74 year-one undergraduate mathematics students at a university in the UK. We classify the proofs according to an extended classification originally used by Stylianides and Stylianides (2009). We found that already at the beginning of Year 1most undergraduate students in our sample associate the request for a proof of a statement to the production of a deductive argument. Moreover, when students failed to produce a correct proof this was mostly because of difficulties in producing deductive arguments. We suggest that more attention should be given to the process of production of deductive argument rather than to the types of non-deductive arguments that some students produce as proofs.