PROCEEDINGS OF THE 19TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2016
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Graphing habits: “I just don’t like that”
Page: 1141
Students’ ways of thinking for graphs remain an important focus in mathematics education due to both the prevalence of graphical representations in the study of mathematics and the persistent difficulties students encounter with graphs. In this report, we draw from clinical interviews to report ways of thinking (or habits) undergraduate students maintain for assimilating graphs. In particular, we characterize actions constituting students’ ways of thinking for graphs that inhibited their ability to represent covariational relationships they conceived to constitute some phenomenon or situation. As an example, we illustrate that students’ ways of thinking for graphs were not productive for their representing a relationship such that neither quantity’s value increased or decreased monotonically.