PROCEEDINGS OF THE 19TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2016
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
On the use of dynamic animations to support students in reasoning quantitatively
Page: 1262
This study addresses the well-documented issue that students struggle to write meaningful expressions and formulas to represent and relate the values of quantities in applied problem contexts. In developing an online intervention, we drew from research that revealed the importance of and processes involved in conceptualizing quantitative relationships to support students in conceptualizing and representing quantitative relationships in applied problem contexts. The results suggest that the use of dynamic animations with prompts that focus students’ attention on conceptualizing and relating quantities can be effective in supporting students in constructing meaningful expressions to represent the value of one quantity in terms of another, and formulas to define how two co-varying quantities change together.