PROCEEDINGS OF THE 19TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2016
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Students’ conceptualizations and representations of how two quantities change together
Page: 771
In this article I discuss the nature of two university precalculus students’ meanings for functions and graphs. I focus on the ways in which these meanings influence how these students reasoned about and represented how two quantities change together. My analysis revealed that a student who views a graph as a static shape and does not see a graph as a representation of how two quantities change together will not be successful in constructing meaningful graphs, even in instances when she is able to reason about two quantities changing together. Students made progress in seeing graphs as emergent representations of how two quantities change together when they conceptualized the point (x,y) as a multiplicative object that represented the relationship between an x and y value.