PROCEEDINGS OF THE 21ST ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2018
San Diego, California
Adaption of Sherin’s Symbolic Forms for the Analysis of Students’ Graphical Understanding
Page: 1664
We describe a methodological presentation of Sherin’s (2001) symbolic forms, discussing adaptions made to the framework to analyze graphical reasoning. Symbolic forms characterize the ideas students associate with patterns in an expression. To expand symbolic forms beyond equations, we supplement it with another framework that considers modeling as discussing mathematical narratives. This affords the language to describe how students think about the process or “story” that could have given rise to a graph. By considering registrations in general terms as structural features students attend to (parts of the “story”), when students assign ideas to registrations (parts of an equation or regions of a graph), they are using symbolic forms.