Show me, don't tell me

Abstract

We, as educators, have all been faced with the struggle of asking students to show their work on assessments. This is especially true when we either ask students to show using logic, a mathematical statement property, or that a lemma is true. However, a growing trend among students is where they will explain how to complete a problem using written out sentences instead of actually doing the mathematics and obtaining a full solution with an answer, if one exists. This paper presents and discusses key evidence of this growing phenomena, offers some suggestions as to why this maybe happening, along with how we, as mathematics educators, can help students get out of this disturbing and concerning trend.