Exploring and promoting a student's covariational reasoning and developing graphing meanings

Abstract

Despite the importance of graphical reasoning, graph construction and interpretation has been shown to be nontrivial. Paoletti et al. (2023) presented a framework that allows for a fine-grained analysis of students’ graphical reasoning as they conceive of graphs as representing two covarying quantities. In this paper, we show how the framework can be used to not only characterize a student’s graphing meanings and reasoning, but also to diagnose complexities in a student's development of such reasoning, and to design tasks that provide opportunities to resolve such complexities. We draw on data from a teaching experiment with a sixth-grade student in the U.S. to highlight how the framework allowed us to identify indications and contraindications of the student’s engaging in reasoning compatible with the framework. Further, we describe how this analysis supported us in designing a task that was aligned with the framework and proved productive in supporting the student's learning. We conclude with a discussion of our findings and their implications for task design and future research.