PUPILS ' IMAGES OF TEACHERS ' REPRESENTATIONS

This paper suggests that learner's procedural and conceptual knowledge of mathematics is constructed, in part, from their mental representations of teachers' external representations. These mental representations reproduce the learner's perceptual experiences and are thus referred to as images. In the first instance individual images may be quasi-sensory or language like in format. Some pupils form a general image of the structure inherent in the external representations whilst others have specific images which embody the surface characteristics of those representations teachers use to communicate the mathematics. For such pupils the medium becomes the message