PROCEEDINGS OF THE 21ST ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2018
San Diego, California
Reasoning about Quantities or Conventions: Investigating Shifts in In-service Teachers’ Meanings after an On-line Graduate Course
Page: 508
Although pervasive in school mathematics, few researchers have paid explicit attention to the impact graphing conventions have on teachers’ meanings for function and rate of change. We examine the role conventions play in in-service teachers’ (ISTs’) meanings and ways to promote their developing more sophisticated meanings. We provided pre and post surveys to ISTs enrolled in an on-line graduate course specifically designed to promote their development of more sophisticated meanings for function and rate of change via reasoning quantitatively. We prompted them to consider hypothetical student responses about these ideas in unconventional representations. In this report, we characterize ISTs’ meanings in relation to conventions commonly maintained in school mathematics and examine shifts in the ISTs’ meanings.