Facilitating Learning Events Through Example Generation

This study deals with the initial understanding that advanced undergraduate mathematics students exhibit when presented with a new concept in an environment requiring self-generation and self-validation of instances of the concept. Data were collected in spring of 1995 through interviews with 11 third and fourth year undergraduate mathematics students. We discuss the data from the perspective of the student's concept image and introduce the notion of learning event to indicate when a student communicates and applies a new understanding of a concept. We infer that the students in our study who employed an example generation learning strategy were more effective in attaining an initial understanding of the new concept than those who primarily employed other learning strategies such as definition reformulation or memorization.