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

Abstract

Recently, an abundant of studies were done on covariational reasoning, indicating its importance
in understanding the idea rate of change. Despite that, the concept of covariational reasoning also urged
past researchers to call out the importance of students to conceive a relationship between quantities. This is
because past studies disclosed the students, either in secondary or tertiary level, lack understanding in
conceiving how quantities influenced each other. Thus, the researcher took this initiative to investigate what
kinds of covariational reasoning had 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 selected through purposive sampling to obtain rich data for this study. 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 participants were unable to conceive a smooth covariation between
variables. The result displayed that only one out of four participants in this study was able to coordinate the
variables successively. Hence, this implies that the difficulties in covariational problems are still unattended,
especially in conceiving how a relationship work among the changed quantities under a situation.