Students' thinking styles and their proof writing levels

Abstract

This study was done to investigate the relationship between thinking styles and proof writing levels among university students. Participants in this study were 124 students who were selected via multi-stage cluster sampling. Sternberg and Wagners' thinking styles inventory was used for assessing students' thinking styles and their proof writing levels were assessed by the proof-writing scale. The results indicated that there was a significant relationship between thinking styles and proof writing levels and the level of significance was 0.95. That means students' thinking styles have the ability to predict their proof writing levels. There was also a positive and meaningful correlation between executive thinking style and the total scores of proof writing levels. The result was as follow: students who have external proofs schemes (44%), empirical proofs schemes (52%) and analytical proofs schemes (6%). There was a significant difference, in term of their thinking style, among students who had varying levels of proof-writing.