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The present study aimed to investigate students’ understanding of the function concept and their ability to classify relations as functions and non-functions. The participants of the study were 130 tenth grade industrial vocational high school students. The data were collected through a two-part test and semi-structured interviews with ten students. While the first part of the test consisted of a set correspondence relation and some questions related to this relation, the second part consisted of relations given in algebraic expressions, graphs, and set of ordered pairs. The data were analyzed by using content analysis. The results suggest that students mostly defined function as "feature". Many of the students were unable to apply definition of a function to classify relations into functions and non-functions. In addition, they had difficulties with defining domain, range, and image sets of functions, and forming (pre-image, image) pairs.

Item Type:	Refereed Article
Keywords:	the concept of function, student difficulties, vocational high school students
Research Division:	Education
Research Group:	Curriculum and pedagogy
Research Field:	Creative arts, media and communication curriculum and pedagogy
Objective Division:	Education and Training
Objective Group:	Teaching and curriculum
Objective Field:	Pedagogy
UTAS Author:	Hatisaru, V (Dr Vesife Hatisaru)
ID Code:	129756
Year Published:	2013
Deposited By:	Education
Deposited On:	2018-12-18
Last Modified:	2019-04-30
Downloads:	35 View Download Statistics