Technology in the Mathematics Classroom: Helping Students Make Connections

The Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics (NCTM, 1989) recommend that high school students should be able to do the following: “represent and analyze relationships using tables, verbal rules, equations, and graphs; translate among tabular, symbolic, and graphical representations of functions; recognize that a variety of problem situations can be modeled by the same type of function; and analyze the effects of parameter changes on the graphs of functions” (p. 154). The teaching of functions by emphasizing the tabular, symbolic and graphical representations and the connections between them became known as “The Rule of Three.” Functions can also be represented by real-world situations themselves so “The Rule of Three” later was called by some as “The Rule of Four”. These representations should not be learned in isolation and that true learning of the concept of function occurs when a person can easily make connections between the various representations and see how changes in one representation effects the other three.