Emergent graphical shape thinking (EGST) involves interpreting or constructing a graph as dynamically generated, which is useful across science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields. Although evidence suggests that students as young as middle school can engage in EGST with support, other research indicates most college students and U.S.…

Although there is much research exploring students' covariational reasoning, there is less research exploring the ways students can leverage such reasoning to coordinate more than two quantities. In this paper, we describe a system of covariational relationships as a comprehensive image of how two varying quantities, having the same attribute…

Emergent graphical shape thinking (Moore & Thompson, 2015) is a way of reasoning that is critical across numerous STEM fields. However, evidence indicates that the underlying component ideas for emergent thinking are underdeveloped in school mathematics education (e.g., Thompson & Carlson, 2017), and few studies directly report on…

In this study, we examined graphical representations in several mathematics, science, and engineering textbooks and practitioner journals with the goal of identifying similarities and differences across these sources. To do this, we drew from the extant research on students interpreting graphs and reasoning covariationally to develop a framework…

Researchers have identified students' difficulties reasoning about inverse functions. Through our review of this literature, three meanings stand out: a formal, 'undoing', and quantitative meaning. Using these meanings as a guide, we analyzed student work collected from a lesson on the topic of inverse functions taught by an experienced high…

Critical to constructing and interpreting graphs is an individual's understanding of the underlying coordinate systems, yet coordinate systems are often overlooked or taken-for-granted in both mathematics education research and curricula. In this paper, we foreground coordinate systems and present a distinction between two uses of coordinate…

The body of research examining students' graphing understandings across STEM fields indicates students are not developing productive meanings for graphs. We conjecture such failings may, in part, be explainable by features of students' use of coordinate systems and graphing activity that are under examined. In this theoretical report, we present a…

Systems of equations are an important topic in school mathematics. However, there is limited research examining productive ways of supporting students' understandings of systems of equations. In this paper, we first present a conceptual analysis of potential ways students may leverage their quantitative and covariational reasoning to graph systems…

Conventional coordinate systems are often considered representational tools for reasoning about mathematical concepts. However, researchers have shown that students experience persistent difficulties as they engage in graphing activity. Using examples from research and textbooks, we present a framework based on a conceptual analysis of the use of…

Research continues to illustrate the important role of covariational and quantitative reasoning in the context of function and graphing. The same body of literature has emphasized that students and teachers often construct meanings for function and graphing that do not foreground these reasoning processes. In order to gain deeper insights into…

Researchers have identified challenges students face when modeling dynamic situations. This report discusses the results of semi-structured clinical interviews with ten prospective secondary mathematics teachers who were provided with a dynamic image of a growing and shrinking cone. We asked the students to graph the relationship between the…

Researchers have argued that students can develop foundational understandings for a variety of mathematical concepts through quantitative reasoning. I extend this research by exploring how students' quantitative reasoning can support them in developing meanings for inverse relations that influence their inverse function meanings. After summarizing…