RUME 27
2025
Alexandria, Virginia
Symbolic Forms for Inverse Relationships? Calling for Clarification on the Construct
Page: 293
Symbolic forms is a theoretical construct that has been used to study the meanings students have for symbols. One promising application of symbolic forms is to describe how students construct mathematical equations to represent real-world relationships, a skill needed across STEM disciplines. As more scholars use symbolic forms as an analytic tool across multiple contexts, they make adaptions to the theoretical construct by expanding existing lists of symbolic forms. In this paper, we continue this line of work by documenting undergraduate STEM majors’ symbolic forms corresponding to inverse relationships that arose as they modeled dynamic scenarios. We end the discussion with theoretical considerations researchers must make to continue to use symbolic forms to describe students' equation construction.