RUME 28
2026
Alexandria, Virginia
Students’ Perturbations and Accommodations in the Context of Graphing
Page: 1307
This study investigates the potential developmental nature of Thompson and Carlson’s (2017) levels of covariational reasoning. Through task-based clinical interviews with Calculus I students, we explore how engagement with non-normative graphing tasks can promote the development of students’ covariational reasoning. Findings reveal that some students experience perturbations when interpreting their self-constructed graphs. We focus on characterizing one students' mathematical activity as she consistently worked to revise her perturbations which ultimately led to her accommodating her graphing scheme through four distinct phases. We take this as preliminary evidence there might be a developmental progression among the levels of covariational reasoning and that students' work interpreting their self-constructed graphs can might be a mechanism for the development of covariational reasoning.