ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. STEM Education
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1577322
ChatGPT's Perspectives on Real Numbers, Straight Lines and Probability -A Quantitative Study on the Influence of Prompting
Provisionally accepted
- University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Large language models like ChatGPT are currently a hot topic in mathematics education research. Various analyses are available on the correctness of mathematical responses and on performance in problem solving or proving contexts. However, the adequate representation of mathematical content in the responses has not yet been sufficiently considered in research. This article addresses this desideratum using the approach of belief systems about mathematics. For this purpose, four perspectives on mathematics are distinguished -the formal-abstract, the empirical-concrete, the application and the toolbox perspective. A qualitative content analysis of 450 ChatGPT responses to the mathematical concepts of real numbers, straight lines and probability and the subsequent quantitative evaluation with chi-square tests showed that the empirical-concrete perspective occurs much more frequently than the other perspectives and the formal-abstract perspective is found very rarely in comparison. The use of appropriate prompts can significantly increase or decrease the occurrence of perspectives. There are also significant differences between the mathematical concepts. The concept of a straight line is significantly more often defined in terms of the empirical-concrete and less often in terms of the formal-abstract perspective compared to the other concepts.
Keywords: artificial intelligence, Beliefs about mathematics, ChatGPT, Generative AI, Large language models, Prompting
Received: 15 Feb 2025; Accepted: 23 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Dilling. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Frederik Dilling, University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.