Abstract

I contrast two preservice teachers’ (PSTs) ways of conceiving relations between quantities the correspondence perspective versus the covariation perspective while modeling global warming. The PSTs completed a mathematical modeling task during an individual, task-based interview. The study shows that the covariation perspective better supports the modeling activity compared to the correspondence perspective. The study found that the covariation perspective supported anticipating concavity, drawing an accurate graph by envisioning continuous and smooth change, and reasoning about the rate of change, all important abilities when modeling relations between quantities (Thompson, 2011).