The main area of interest at King's concerns the capacity of the short-term working memory and the extent that this can be effectively `increased' in mathematical thinking, a general aim being to gain an understanding of, and find ways to promote, the phenomenon in which a collection of related items - processes, sentences, representations, objects, properties, or steps of logical deduction - become mentally compressed into one single mental entity. Two recent studies arising from this concern the nature of students' difficulties in negating statements involving quantifiers, and first year students' responses to cues in proving the irrationality of the square roots of 2 and 3. Currently research is concerned with the development of algebraic ability in school pupils at Key Stage 4.

Postgraduate Study