Students’ Quantitative Reasoning while Engaging in a Mathematical Modeling Task Designed for Learning Linear Function

Abstract

It is important for students to think the quantities related to the linearfunctions, to construct new quantities and to relate the differentrepresentations of linear functions through quantitative reasoning. Thepurpose of this study is to examine the students’ quantitative reasoningwhile engaging in the mathematical modeling task, which was designed, forlearning the linear function. The participants of the study conducted with ateaching experiment were consisted of ten 10th grade students with threegirls and seven boys. The students engaged in the written task in pairs. Thedata were gathered from each group’s written solutions and thetranscriptions of the camera recordings of the process of enagaging in thetask. The data were analysed by ongoing and retrospective analyses in thedirection of the students' quantitative reasoning. Based on the data analysis,it was seen that students were cognitively more active while they wereworking on a situation which they had experienced or which was meaningfulfor them. It could be said that designing the task by considering thequantitative reasoning to trigger reflective abstraction was important factorfor students to be supported for constructing the quantities. In this context, itis suggested to benefit from mathematical modeling tasks while teaching theconcepts.