PROCEEDINGS OF THE 21ST ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2018
San Diego, California
Graphing as a Tool for Exploring Students’ A↵ective Experience as Mathematics Learners
Page: 533
Researching affective issues can be difficult in education; methods like interviews and surveys can place artificial categories on participants’ experience and exert biased influence. This lack of tools to study affect calls for better methods. We explore graphing as a potential tool with affordances for studying affect, by reporting results of three separate studies at different timescales where undergraduates graphed affective phenomena like confidence or emotion: two in an introduction to proof course and one in a pre-service teacher content course. By systematically describing each study and looking across the three, we argue that graphing can be a useful technique for representing experience. Its utility lies in aligning research goals with the structure imposed by the temporal axis. More structure along the temporal axis allows researchers access to what a student experiences at predetermined temporal points and less structure allows access to what students themselves find to be salient events.