Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Do You See What I See? Deepening Teachers’ Understanding Of Linear Equations Through Student Interviews, Tamara Pearson, Kelli L. Nipper, Catherine Matos

Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Georgia Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators

Many teachers have trouble transitioning their students between natural recursive thinking about the data and algebraic notation for representing linear functions (Zazkis & Liljedahl, 2002).

In this study, we interviewed eighteen middle school students to see how they used prior instruction to think about a geometric pattern and construct its corresponding linear equation. All students

were given the same task to complete and were questioned about their thinking during the interview.

We found that the recording of pattern recognition plays a substantial part in helping students recognize and write explicit patterns. By having students decompose the total perimeter into how …