Abstract
While there are many studies on elementary school students' functional thinking, there is a lack of research that focuses on the core concept of covariation. The purpose of this study is to present a case study of teaching covariation to fifth-grade students using perimeter and area of polygons. Three lessons were conducted in the first semester of fifth grade, following the study of rules and correspondences in Unit 3 and the perimeter and area of polygons in Unit 6. The first lesson was about exploring and expressing changes in perimeters as the length of a side of a square changes, and the other lessons were about exploring and expressing changes in area of a polygon. In these lessons, we provided tasks that naturally built on perimeter and area to see if elementary students could understand covariations and variables. As a result, students were able to understand the situations in which two quantities change simultaneously and to represent the change of two quantities in various ways. Students also used the given function table to reason about the relationship between two quantities, making it easier to perceive and represent relationships between expressions. Based on these findings, this study discussed implications for the teaching of covariation to elementary school students.
Published Version
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