Abstract by Sarah Cox
How Students Interpret Variables
A group of middle school students were asked the question, “Which is larger, x or x+x?” Many students treated x as a positive number and claimed x+x was larger than x. Through a class discussion, negatives and zero as values for x were also used. How do students interpret the variable x in the context of multiple domains? For example, one student believes that all negative numbers have a negative sign in front so, intuitively, a single variable x cannot represent a negative input. I will present student work that taps into the domain reasoning of students.