The theme of the 2017 Physics Education Research (PER) Conference was "Mathematization and Physics Education."

The focus on mathematics in physics is increasing along with connections between the PER and Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education (RUME) communities. Thus we highlighted mathematization research at the 2017 PERC. Mathematization refers to the spontaneous tendency to use mathematical concepts to quantify and make sense of the physical world. It is not about how well people can perform mathematical procedures. Rather, mathematization describes how people conceptualize the meaning of mathematics in the context of physics.

Expert-like mathematization in physics involves both a procedural and conceptual mastery of the prerequisite mathematics involved. Gray and Tall highlighted this distinction and refer to the target learning goal as proceptual understanding, in which procedural mastery and conceptual understanding coexist. When reasoning mathematically with physics quantities, many students become entrenched in a procedural approach. Some reach a high level of procedural efficiency without much conceptual mathematical understanding, while other students develop greater mathematical flexibility. An achievement gap emerges between those performing procedurally and those developing greater flexibility. This gap in early math learning is referred to as the proceptual divide.

The proceptual divide is evident in physics courses, where success depends on having a proceptual understanding of both the prerequisite math and the learned physics. For example, the obstacles calculus level students encounter using basic proportional reasoning when it involves physics quantities and real numbers, rather than everyday quantities and whole numbers. Similarly, most introductory physics students approach symbol-rich physics problems that involve calculus or trigonometry as a procedure, framing their task as one of answermaking instead of sensemaking.