There are several terms and points of view in mathematics education that are somewhat
similar or support each other, and might be brought together under the single phrase
“mathematical habits of mind.” We discuss several of these views that we see as related.
Habits of mind were introduced by Cuoco, Goldenberg, and Mark (1996) as an organizing
principle for mathematics curricula in which high-school students and college students think
about mathematics the way mathematicians do. They asserted:
The goal is … to help high school students learn and adopt some of the ways that
mathematicians think about problems. … A curriculum organized around habits of mind
tries to close the gap between what the users and makers of mathematics do and what they
say. … It is a curriculum that encourages false starts, calculations, experiments, and special
cases. (p. 376)
They identified two broad classes of habits of mind: (a) general habits of mind that cuts across
every discipline, and (b) content-specific habits of mind for the discipline of mathematics.
General habits of mind include “pattern-sniffing,” experimenting, formulating, “tinkering,”
inventing, visualizing, and conjecturing. Mathematical habits of mind, or mathematical
approaches to things, include talking big thinking small (e.g., instantiating with examples),
talking small thinking big (e.g., generalizing, abstracting), thinking in terms of functions, using
multiple points of view, mixing deduction and experiment, and pushing the language (e.g., at
first assuming the existence of things we want to exist, such as 20
).
Habits of mind have two important characteristics: the “thinking” characteristic and the
“habituated” characteristic. In addition, habits of mind are reflexively related to classroom
practices. Below we discuss various related views of habits of mind