PROCEEDINGS OF THE 20TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2017
San Diego, California
The role of visual reasoning in evaluating statements about real-valued functions: A comparison of two advanced calculus students
Page: 93
The purpose of this study is to examine the characteristics of students’ visual reasoning in the context of evaluating statements about real-valued functions. We conducted clinical interviews with nine undergraduate students in which we asked them to evaluate several mathematical statements using graphs to explain their reasoning. In this paper, we focus on two Advanced Calculus students and the differences in their visual reasoning in these tasks. Our findings indicate that students’ visual reasoning accounts for key differences in their understandings of mathematical statements. In this paper, we introduce a visual reasoning framework which emerged from our data. We also provide examples from the two students to highlight the use of the framework to characterize students’ visual reasoning as value-thinking or location-thinking.