Structures in direct and inverse forms of a function evidenced by 7–8-year-old students
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15359/ru.35-2.16Keywords:
direct variation of a function, functional thinking, generalization, inverse variation of a function, structureAbstract
This study aimed to identify and compare the structures evidenced by primary school students in direct and inverse forms of a function, both working with particular cases and generalizing from an early algebra functional approach. The study was qualitative, exploratory, and descriptive. A contextualized task was designed involving the linear function y=x+4 in direct and inverse variations. Six 2nd graders (7-8 years of age) from a school in Granada (Spain) participated in the study performing a designed task during semi-structured interviews conducted in the 2017-2018 school year. We described the structures evidenced in both variations with particular cases and the general case. All six students identified adequate structures in the direct variation of the function at least once during the interview. Adequate structures were also observed in the inverse variation. However, some students did not respond to this section or were not asked these questions. The majority of the structures that students generalized were produced when explicitly asked for generalization, in both direct and inverse variations of the function. When using the relationship between two variables, differences were found between structures identified by students in both direct and inverse variations. Most of the structures identified were adequate for the problem, which encourages work with both variations of linear functions in primary education.
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