PROCEEDINGS OF THE 18TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2015
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Students’ reasoning when constructing quantitatively rich situations
Page: 845
Researchers continue to emphasize the importance of examining students’ reasoning when constructing situations involving numerous quantities and relationships (e.g., quantitatively rich situations). To explore student reasoning in such situations, I conducted a semester-long teaching experiment with two mathematics education undergraduate students. The teaching experiment sessions were focused on providing the students repeated opportunities to conceptualize quantitatively rich situations. In this proposal, I explore a few themes that emerged through analyses of their activity, characterizing their thinking during their construction of such situations. For instance, the order in which a student coordinated two quantities (e.g., coordinating a change in quantity A then a corresponding change in quantity B versus coordinating a change in quantity B then a corresponding change in quantity A) emerged as critical to their images and their representations of the situation. This and other findings provide important insights into ways students’ reason quantitatively and covariationally.