Teaching practice aimed at promoting student engagement with metarules of defining

By viewing students’ learning to define as learning about meta-discursive rules about defining and how to engage with them in their activity of defining, we investigated teaching practices that aim to promote such learning by analyzing a teaching experiment in which Calculus II students reinvented a formal definition of a limit. The teaching practices we identified addressed how students view defining tasks by providing a method to check whether their narratives satisfied the metarules that they aimed to follow and also provided guidance about how to revise their definitions to satisfy those metarules. Our results provide an example for the teaching practice that promotes student learning about and engagement with new meta-discursive rules that existing literature called for in general, especially in their reinvention of a formal definition of a mathematical object . • Engaging with metarules of defining is essential for reinventing a definition. • Engaging with metarules helps identify problems with one’s definitions. • Engaging with metarules informs procedures to resolve problems with definitions. • Teaching practices can promote student adoption and engagement with metarules.