Developing Middle-School Students’ Understandings of Coordinate Systems (Mid-CoS) Project

Despite the importance of graphs in STEM fields, mathematics and science education researchers have shown that students of all ages experience persistent difficulties constructing and interpreting such graphs. Dr. Paoletti’s goals are (a) to examine how to leverage middle school students’ reasoning about quantities that change in tandem to develop understandings of graphs as representing covarying quantities and (b) to develop a sequence of lessons to promote students’ graphing understandings grounded in this reasoning. By designing dynamic interactive tasks with varying quantities, Dr. Paoletti and colleagues are investigating the ways in which students are imagining quantities changing and, through their descriptions and graphical representations, how two quantities are changing in tandem. Additionally, Dr. Paoletti and colleagues are investigating how such tasks can be integrated into the existing middle school curricula to support students’ variational reasoning, covariational reasoning, and their developing understandings of coordinate systems and graphical representations.