A Glimpse into Secondary Students’ Understanding of Functions

Authors

Jonathan L. Brendefur, Boise State UniversityFollow
Gwyneth Hughes, Boise State UniversityFollow
Robert Ely, University of Idaho

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-20-2015

Abstract

In this article we examine how secondary school students think about functional relationships. More specifically, we examined seven students’ intuitive knowledge in regards to representing two real-world situations with functions. We found students do not tend to represent functional relationships with coordinate graphs even though they are able to do so. Instead, these students tend to represent the physical characteristics of the situation. In addition, we discovered that middleschool students had sophisticated ideas of dependency and covariance. All the students were able to use their models of the situation to generalize and make predictions. These findings suggest that secondary students have the ability to describe covariant and dependent relations and that their models of functions tend to be more intuitive than mathematical-even for the students in algebra II and calculus. Our work suggests a possible framework that begins describing a way of analyzing students’ understanding of functions.

Copyright Statement

This document was originally published by International Journal for Mathematics Teaching and Learning in International Journal for Mathematics Teaching and Learning. Copyright restrictions may apply.

Publication Information

Brendefur, Jonathan L.; Hughes, Gwyneth; and Ely, Robert. (2015). "A Glimpse into Secondary Students’ Understanding of Functions". International Journal for Mathematics Teaching and Learning, 1-22.