PROCEEDINGS OF THE 21ST ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2018
San Diego, California
Relationships between Precalculus Students’ Engagement and Shape Thinking
Page: 1084
This study examines relationships between community college precalculus students’ understanding and engagement to link mathematical success to a malleable construct, and offer new insights for addressing consistently poor success rates in community college precalculus (Barnes, Cerrito, & Levi, 2004). Two-part interviews, consisting of a task and debriefing, were conducted with 8 students to investigate their shape thinking (Moore & Thompson, 2015), and engagement, conceptualized through flow theory (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975). Results suggest that students can be highly engaged in mathematics tasks regardless of understanding and that students exhibiting different ways of thinking about graph construction tended to experience different forms of engagement.