Date of Award
Spring 5-23-2021
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Teaching and Leadership
Advisor(s)
Fonger , Nicole N. F.
Keywords
Functional Thinking, Networking Theories, Quadratic Functions, Quantitative Reasoning, Representational Fluency, Representations
Subject Categories
Education | Science and Mathematics Education
Abstract
Abstract In this dissertation, I explore ways to support secondary school students' meaningful understanding of quadratic functions. Specifically, I investigate how students co-developed representational fluency (RF) and functional thinking (FT), when they gained meaningful understanding of quadratic functions. I also characterize students' co-emergence of RF and FT on each representation (e.g., a graph, a symbolic equation, and a table) and across multiple representations. To accomplish these goals, I employed a design research methodology: a teaching experiment with eight Turkish-American secondary school students in an after-school context at a Turkish Community Center. I constructed the design principles and design elements for the study by networking two distinct domains of literature—representations and quantitative reasoning—to support students' meaningful learning. I conducted ongoing and retrospective analyses on the enhanced transcriptions of small- and whole-group interactions. The analyses revealed a learning-ecology framework that supported secondary school students' meaningful understanding of quadratic functions. The learning-ecology framework consisted of three components: enacted task characteristics, teacher pedagogical moves, and socio-mathematical norms. Furthermore, the findings showed that students employed two types of reasoning when they created and connected representations of quantities and the relationships between them: static thinking and lateral thinking. Static thinking is recalling a learned fact to represent a quantitative relationship with no attention to how quantities covary on a representation, while lateral thinking is a creative way of thinking wherein students conceive of concrete representations of functions as an emergent quantitative relationship. The findings also showed that students' co-emergence of RF and FT can be operationalized into four levels starting from lesser sophisticated reasoning to greater sophisticated reasoning. Level 0 is a disconnection, level 1 is a partial connection, level 2 is a connection and level 3 is flexible a connection between students' RF and FT. The dissertation informs teachers and the mathematics education community by (a) reporting and verifying the learning-ecology framework that supported students' meaningful understanding of quadratic functions; and (b) characterizing students' co-emergence of RF and FT within and across multiple representations.
Access
Open Access
Recommended Citation
Altindis, Nigar, "Exploring the Nature of the Co-emergence of Students' Representational Fluency and Functional Thinking" (2021). Dissertations - ALL. 1508.
https://surface.syr.edu/etd/1508