Hwa Young Lee
Texas State University, TX·Education Research
Graphs are everywhere in science and engineering, yet many students struggle to read and build them. This project argues that the root of the problem lies earlier: in how students understand coordinate systems, the grids of axes and reference points that give every point on a graph its meaning.
- Fields
Education Research
Mathematics & Statistics
Psychology
- Topics
mathematics education
middle school
graphing
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2027
What they work on
- Describe how individual middle-school students create and interpret frames of reference, coordinate systems and graphs, using one-on-one clinical interviews that probe their reasoning.
- Identify the general progressions through which students' ways of thinking about coordinates and graphs develop, through repeated cycles of small-scale teaching experiments.
- Design, test and refine sequences of instructional tasks in the free Desmos graphing platform that build on students' varied ways of thinking and avoid common graphing difficulties.
- Develop a theory and cognitive models explaining students' developing graphing understanding, refined through design-based cycles of intervention and revision.
More about the research
It looks at how middle-school students think about frames of reference, the starting points and directions used to locate things, before they ever construct or interpret a graph.
Why it matters
Many students reach high school and college without a solid grasp of graphs, which can block success in STEM courses. This work could give middle-school teachers freely available Desmos task sequences grounded in how students actually think about coordinates and reference frames. It may also give curriculum designers a research-based account of how graphing understanding develops, so instruction can build on students' ideas rather than work against them.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
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The school
Texas State University: 8 labs on PI Pages, $165M a year on research, 71 research doctorates a year.
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