PROCEEDINGS OF THE 21ST ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2018
San Diego, California
Figurative Thought and a Student’s Reasoning About “Amounts” of Change
Page: 787
This paper discusses a student coordinating changes in covarying quantities. We adapt Piaget’s constructs of figurative and operative thought to describe her partitioning activity in terms of the extent that it is constrained to carrying out particular sensorimotor actions on perceptually available material, and we relate such descriptions to her thinking about quantitative amounts of change. We conclude the paper by discussing how characterizing these nuances of student thinking in terms of figurative and operative thought contributes to current literature on covariational reasoning and conceptualization of concept construction.