In this dissertation, I explore ways to support secondary school students' meaningful understanding of quadratic functions. Specifically, I investigate how students co-developed representational fluency (RF) and functional thinking (FT), when they gained meaningful understanding of quadratic functions. I also characterize students' co-emergence of…

In the subject matter of functional relationships, a student's ability to translate from one form of representation to another is seen as a central competence. In the course of the HEUREKO project (heuristic work with representations of functional relationships and the diagnosis of mathematical competencies of students), a theoretical competence…

Mixed visuals of numbers and graphs are available in various financial reports that demonstrate the financial status and risks of a firm. GWN (graphs with numbers) and TWG (table of numbers with graphs) were used as two alternative visuals derived from the actual data of two large public companies, one from food manufacturing industry (food) and…

Tables are a presentation format that is commonly used to organize information, and they are widely present in many scenarios of our students' everyday activities; however, there is a scarcity of studies devoted to their analysis. Some of these studies point out that the organization of data into a double-entry table presents difficulties for…

This paper reports on the development and evaluation of cognitive tools used by learners to interpret graphs and tables. The development of these tools was informed by research about how learners interpreted graphs and tables. A prototype of the cognitive tools was trialed with a small sample of preservice teachers. This prototype was then…

Discusses current use of psychological theory in software science and reviews recent developments in cognitive psychology relevant to programing (human information processing, expert-novice differences). Critique of Maurice Halstead's model of cognitive aspects of programing and a structured data flow perspective (control flow and data flow…

Information coordination tasks are tasks that require concurrent performance of two or more component tasks and the subsequent coordination of component information. In this experiment, different procedures, componential and contextual, were used to train separate groups of college campus community members (n=35 and n=33) in a coordination task…

The growing body of research investigating how people search for or locate information in a variety of materials is reviewed and extended. Although the nature of materials and the complexity of locating tasks varies in the seven articles, each aims to elucidate the conditions that affect search processes. (SLD)

Describes a study which measured how ninth-grade students integrated information about mathematical concepts when working with Triple Representation Model software. Tables, graphs, and algebraic functions were linked, allowing students to manipulate several representations of the same concept. Examples of mathematical problems and student case…