PROCEEDINGS OF THE 20TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2017
San Diego, California
Function sameness to “function” meaning
Page: 747
Exploring students’ conceptions of sameness is an avenue for exploring their understandings of the objects being compared. More specifically, finding what students think it means for functions to be identical can help us figure out what students think it means for something to be a function, since identity within a category (in this case the category of function) is inextricably tied to the defining aspect of that category. This paper has three primary aims: to illustrate the importance of using students’ assessments of sameness as a means to discover their concept images, to describe a particular student’s concept image of function and of function sameness, and to suggest that the math education research community develop a more refined understanding of a “process”(cf., Breidenbach, Dubinsky, Hawks, & Nichols, 1992) conception of function.