Using Decoding the Disciplines and Students as Partners to Explore Student Graph Reading

In this study, we employed two disparate methodologies – Students as Partners (SaP) and Decoding the Disciplines (DtD)– to deepen our understanding of undergraduate students’ approaches to reading graphs. Engaging SaP means including student investigators as equal contributors in a collaborative research project. DtD involves interviewing faculty members to uncover the implicit mental processes that they utilize when doing critical disciplinary thinking. Specifically, our (a faculty and student team) goal was to adapt DtD for use by student interviewers with student interviewees. We describe the steps students report that they take in graph reading, which has been identified as a “bottleneck.” Many students indicated that they think of graphs as self-explanatory images and that reading them is not a process. We contrast these steps to those that have been described by faculty. This project demonstrated that both SaP and DtD are powerful methodologies for exploring mental processes in non-experts.