- Title
- High school students’ covariational reasoning in interpreting dynamic situations
- Creator
- Tran, Dung
- Date
- 2018
- Type
- Text; Conference proceedings
- Identifier
- http://researchonline.federation.edu.au/vital/access/HandleResolver/1959.17/201530
- Identifier
- vital:19555
- Abstract
- In recent years, school mathematics has increased its emphasis on functions and functional relationships in dynamic situations (Carlson, Jacobs, Coe, Larsen, & Hu, 2002). Secondary school mathematics curricula support the promotion of conceptual understanding on functions including patterns of change to help student understand the fundamental ideas of calculus (Zeytun, Cetinkaya, & Erbas, 2010). However, research has suggested that undergraduate students show their weak understanding of functions while entry-level university courses do little to address this deficiency. Research on students’ understanding of functions has revealed that even high-performing students have difficulty modeling functional relationships of dynamic functional events. Their difficulties resulted from the lack of abilities in imagining and coordinating the simultaneous changes in variables, namely in determining the rate of change of one variable as it continuously varies in a dependent relationship with another variable (Carlson et al., 2002). This type of abilities is known as covariational reasoning, which involves imagining and coordinating the changes in two quantities simultaneously (Carlson et al., 2002). Dynamic functional situations are recommended to be used in order to promote students’ understanding about the relationship between the rate of change and covariant aspects of functions (Carlson et al., 2002). Many studies were conducted to investigate undergraduate students’ covariational reasoning abilities (eg, Carlson et al., 2002; Johnson, McClintock, & Hornbein, 2017) and prospective and in-service teachers’ covariational reasoning (Yemen-Karpuzcu, Ulusoy, & Işıksal-Bostan 2017; Zeytun et al., 2010), paucity of research is done to explore secondary school students’ covariational reasoning and little is known about their reasoning about the covariant aspects of function in dynamic situations. Therefore, this paper has explored high school students’ covariational reasoning in solving tasks about dynamic situations involving two simultaneously changing quantities. The focus was on students’ ability to reason about covarying quantities and their difficulties in interpreting dynamic functional situations.
- Relation
- 8th ICMI-East Asia Regional Conference on Mathematics Education in ICMI-EARCOME8: Proceedings of the 8th ICMI-East Asia Regional Conference on Mathematics Education Vol. 2, p. 174-181
- Rights
- All metadata describing materials held in, or linked to, the repository is freely available under a CC0 licence
- Rights
- Open Access
- Subject
- Covariational reasoning; Dynamic situations; Mathematics education; Secondary school mathematics; Rate of change
- Full Text
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