Embodying Covariation through Collaborative Instrumentation

Y

9

National Science Foundation (NSF)

1812887

Mathematics Instruction; Graphs; Thinking Skills; Difficulty Level; Learning Processes; Teaching Methods; Task Analysis; Cooperative Learning; Algebra; Middle School Students; Design; Video Technology

Covariational reasoning and the creation and interpretation of graphs of covariational situations are important skills in math and science. Unfortunately, research shows that students often struggle to make meaningful connections between graphs and the covariational situations they represent. Educational activities designed to help students overcome this struggle tend to use either student-generated or automatically-generated graphs, and have students either act out covariational situations or more passively observe them. In this paper, we present the design of a tool and task that enabled two students to simultaneously embody both the creation of a graph and the covariational actions that the graph represents. Through a process of collaborative instrumentation, the students made meaningful connections between their motions and the embodied traces they created as they reasoned about the covarying quantities of height and time. [For the complete proceedings, see ED630210.]

As Provided

2023

ED630489