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Teachers' Meanings For Function Notation

Abstract

"This study explores teachers' meanings for function notation and function definitions. We focus on what teachers see as representing an output and as representing a function definition, and we analysed meanings and ways of thinking that teachers have according to what they see. Our analyses suggest that teachers who attend to a functions rule of assignment as representing its output or as constituting its definition operationalize function notation computationally, are unaware of inconsistent use of variables, and are oriented to find an explicit rule when asked to represent varying quantities. In this paper we also hypothesize that attention to the rule of assignment creates an inability to use function notation representationally."