PROCEEDINGS OF THE 21ST ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2018
San Diego, California
Conventions or Constraints? Pre-service and In-service Teachers’ Understandings
Page: 597
Several researchers have noted that it is important for students and teachers to be able to differentiate between what is mathematically critical to a concept or representation and what is a convention maintained for the purposes of communication. In this report, we describe two studies examining the extent to which pre-service and in-service teachers (PSTs and ISTs) understand graphing conventions either as conventions or as rules that must be unquestionably maintained. We highlight the extent to which conventions are pervasive in both PSTs’ and ISTs’ meanings for graphs and related ideas (i.e., function and rate of change) and describe why such meanings are problematic.