MALAYSIAN PRE-SERVICE MATHEMATICS TEACHER’S COVARIATIONAL REASONING: A VASE PROBLEM

Abstract

Recently, abundant of studies were conducted on covariational reasoning, indicating its importance in understanding the idea rate of change. Despite that, the concept of covariational reasoning was also urged by past researchers to call out the importance for students to conceive a relationship between quantities. This is because past studies disclosed the students, either in secondary or tertiary level, a lack of understanding in conceiving how quantities influenced each other. Thus, the researchers took this initiative to investigate on what kinds of covariational reasoning was done by Malaysian pre-service mathematics teachers, due to its importance in conceiving dynamical activity in real-life application. This study was participated by four pre-service mathematics teachers which was selected through purposive sampling to ensure that rich data was obtained. The findings revealed that the participants’ covariational reasoning was underdeveloped in many ways. The result was consistent with other studies as it was found that pre-service mathematics teachers were unable to conceive variables based on given situation, since they were either interchanged roles between variables or setting time as the input. In return, most of the participants were unable to conceive a smooth covariation between variables. The result displayed that only one out of four participants in this study are able to coordinate the variables successively. Hence, this implies that the difficulties in covariational problem were still unattended, especially in conceiving how a relationship works among the changed quantities under a situation.