Student's Conceptions of Function Transformation

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to assess object and schema conceptions of transformations of functions for undergraduate level students of Mongolian National University. The research participants were 37 undergraduate students who attended the Calculus course of the third author. To achieve our purpose two of the authors analyzed students' project work independently based on the pre-developed rubrics and further analyses were made. Students' project work included recognition of simple and complicated transformation of functions visually, expressing algebraic forms of such transformations and drawing a doll using transformations of a half circle of radius one. The research results show that students' object and schema conception of transformations of functions were poor. Finding the reason for these poor results is a subject for future research. Moreover, students who were able to recognize more complicated transformations visually could draw a doll using the half circle while the ones who could express transformations of both simple and complicated transformations in algebraic form were able to construct a doll using transformations of the half circle.