How Students Attempt to Reduce Abstraction in the Learning of Mathematics and in the Learning of Computer Science

Abstract

This article focuses on ion and ways in which students cope with abstraction. The article has two goals: first, it illustrates how the theme of reducing abstraction (Hazzan, 1999) is useful for analyzing students' thinking about abstract concepts in mathematics and in computer science; second, it demonstrates how theories based on mathematics education research can be applied to analyzing students' understanding of computer science concepts. The main section of the article analyzes the understanding of concepts from four fields – abstract algebra, computability, data structures and differential equations – through the lens of reducing abstraction. The analysis shows that a wide range of cognitive phenomena can be explained by one theoretical framework.