Quality in students' writing in mathematics

Overview & Synopsis

We present a literature review with the aim to identify and characterise research frameworks that propose standards for assessing the quality of students' mathematical writing. Eleven studies that investigated students' solutions to problems, journal writing, essays, or instructions, and proposed frameworks for analysing such writing, were identified. The analysis sought to characterise what the frameworks attended to in students' mathematical writing and whether they described a progression with a reference to quality of the writing. The main result is that the frameworks mainly attend to the content and that there is little attention to form. Further, quality is most often regarded as a question of content, if the text contains for example an explanation, then the explanation is seen as a sign of quality with no reference the form. Our review concludes that research rarely describes levels of quality in students' mathematical writing, something we believe further research should do.