• The Mathematical Education
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• v.62 no.4
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• pp.473-490
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• 2023

Previous studies from domestic and abroad are accumulating information on how to reason students' continuous changes through teaching experiments. These studies deal with scenes in which students who make 'smooth reasoning' and 'chunky reasoning' construct mathematical results together in teaching experiments. However, in order to analyze their results in more detail, it is necessary to check what kind of results a student reasoning in a specific way constructs for the tasks of previous studies. According to the need for these studies, the researcher conducted a total of 14 teaching experiments on one first-year high school student who was found to make 'chunky reasoning'. In this study, it was possible to observe a scene in which a student who makes 'chunky reasoning' constructs an output similar to 'a mathematical result constructed by students with various reasoning methods(smooth reasnoning or chunky reasoning) in previous studies.' In particular, the student who participated in this study observed a consistent construction method of constructing the function of 'time-speed' from the function of 'time-distance'. The researcher expected that information on this student's distinctive construction methods would be helpful for subsequent studies.

• The Mathematical Education
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• v.55 no.3
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• pp.251-279
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• 2016

There are many studies on 'how' students solve mathematical problems, but few of them sufficiently explained 'why' they have to solve the problems in their own different ways. As quantitative reasoning is the basis for algebraic reasoning, to scrutinize a student's way of dealing with quantities in a problem situation is critical for understanding why the student has to solve it in such a way. From our teaching experiments with two ninth-grade students, we found that emergences of a certain level of covariational reasoning were highly consistent across different types of problems within each participating student. They conceived the given problem situations at different levels of covariation and constructed their own quantity-structures. It led them to solve the problems with the resources accessible to their structures only, and never reconciled with the other's solving strategies even after having reflection and discussion on their solutions. It indicates that their own structure of quantities constrained the whole process of problem solving and they could not discard the structures. Based on the results, we argue that teachers, in order to provide practical supports for students' problem solving, need to focus on the students' way of covariational reasoning of problem situations.

• School Mathematics
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.457-478
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• 2016

The purpose of this study is to investigate middle school students' understanding and development of function graphs. We collected the data from the teaching experiment with two middle school students who had not yet received instruction on linear function in school. The students participated in a 15-day teaching experiment(Steffe, & Thompson, 2000). Each teaching episode lasted one or two hours. The students initially focused on numerical values rather than the overall relationship between the variables in functional situations. This study described meaning, role of and students' responses for the given tasks, which revealed the students' understanding and development of function graphs. Especially we analyzed students' responses based on their methods to solve the tasks, reasoning that derived from those methods, and their solutions. The results indicate that their continuous reasoning played a significant role in their understanding of function graphs.