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Representational Disfluency in Algebra: Evidence from Student Gestures and Speech by Kristen N. Bieda; Mitchell J. Nathan is a Social Sciences article available to read on EtoBox.

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In this investigation, we analyzed US middle school students' (grades 6-8) gestures and speech during interviews to understand students' reasoning while interpreting quantitative patterns represented by Cartesian graphs. We studied students' representational fluency, defined as their abilities to work within and translate among representations. While students translated across representations to address task demands, they also translated to a different representation when reaching an impasse, where the initial representation could not be used to answer a task. During these impasse events, which we call representational disfluencies, three categories of behavior were observed. Some students perceived the graph to be bounded by its physical and numerical limits, and these students were categorized as physically grounded. A second, related, disfluency was categorized as spatially grounded. Students who were classified as spatially grounded exhibited a bounded view of the graph that limited their ability to make far predictions until they physically altered the spatial configuration of the graph by rescaling or extending the axes. Finally, students who recovered from one or more of the

Who reads Representational Disfluency in Algebra: Evidence from Student Gestures and Speech?

Author

Kristen N. Bieda; Mitchell J. Nathan

Publisher

Springer Science and Business Media LLC

Published

2009

Language

EN

Field

Social Sciences