This paper provides an instrumental account of precalculus students' graphical process for solving polynomial inequalities. It is carried out in terms of the students' instrumental schemes as mediated by handheld graphing calculators and in cooperation with their classmates in a classroom setting. The ethnographic narrative relays an instrumental…

Describes how the meaning of a tool was constructed by students and their teacher, and how students used the tool to construct mathematical meaning out of particular tasks through a qualitative classroom-based study. Suggests that the nature of the mathematical tasks and the role, knowledge, and beliefs of the teacher influenced the emergence of…