Intellectual-Need-Provoking Tasks (Pre-print Version of "Provoking Intellectual Need")

Kien H. Lim, University of Texas at El Paso

Abstract

According to Harel's Necessity Principle (1998) “students are most likely to learn when they see a need for what we intend to teach them, where by need is meant intellectual need, not social or economic need” (p. 501). Intellectual need for a particular mathematical concept is an internal drive experienced by a learner to solve a problem. In this paper, I discuss how tasks can be designed to provoke the intellectual need for two mathematical ideas, prime factorization and lowest common multiple.