PROCEEDINGS OF THE 19TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2016
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Honorable Mention: Graphing habits: “I just don’t like that.”
Page: 16
We report on clinical interviews to describe U.S. undergraduate students’ ways of thinking for graphs as representations of measurable attributes of dynamic situations (e.g., a road trip or an amusement park ride). In particular, we describe students’ actions that we interpret to be habitual to their uses of graphs. By habits, we refer to specific schemes and actions constituting students’ ways of thinking through which they routinely assimilate their graphing activity. Some habits were problematic in that they inhibited the students’ abilities to represent covariational relationships they had conceived to constitute some dynamic situation. For example, we illustrate that some students’ ways of thinking for graphs resulted in their experiencing perturbations if neither quantity’s value increased or decreased monotonically.