Students’ sense-making frames in mathematics lectures

•Students believe that they take verbatim notes of the instructor's writing during a lecture.•Students’ note-taking appears to be mediated by their sense-making practices.•Students appeared to use three different types of sense-making frames.•Sense-making frames influenced what students noticed and the ways they made sense.•Frame-choice resulted in some missed opportunities for learning from the lecture.

The goal of this study is to describe the various ways students make sense of mathematics lectures. Here, sense-making refers to a process by which people construct personal meanings for phenomena they experience. This study introduces the idea of a sense-making frame and describes three different types of frames: content-, communication-, and situating-oriented. We found that students in an abstract algebra class regularly engaged in sense-making during lectures on equivalence relations, and this sense-making influenced their note-taking practices. We discuss the relationship between the choice of frame, the students’ sense-making practices, and the potential missed opportunities for learning from the lecture. These results show the importance of understanding the ways students make sense of aspects of mathematics lectures and how their sense-making practices influence what they might learn from the lecture.