Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Mathematical text reading seems to require a different type of literacy than others since it heavily introduces abstractconcepts and require strict logical and literal reading. In this paper, we focus on grades 611 (elementary through highschool) students skill in reading math definitions, but not problem solving. Our experiment showed that their skills inreading and understanding math definitions improves as long as math is obligatory (through the 10th grade) but reachesa plateau very quickly after that. However, teaching a math definition and using it to solve exercise problems in theclassroom do not seem to improve students ability of reading that specific definition.