PROCEEDINGS OF THE 19TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2016
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
What do students attend to when first graphing in R^3?
Page: 693
This poster considers what students attend to as they first encounter R3 coordinate axes and are asked to graph functions with free variables. Graphs are critical representations, yet students struggle with graphing functions of more than one variable. Because prior work has revealed that students’ conceptions of multivariable graph are often related to their conceptions about single variable functions, I used an actor-oriented transfer perspective to identify what students see as similar between graphing functions with free variables in R2 and R3. I considered what students attended to mathematically, and found that they focused on equidistance, parallelism, and coordinate points.