Graphing Trouble

An extensive body of research shows that many primary and secondary school students struggle with graph construction and graph interpretation. Many troublesome aspects of graphing have been identified at this level. We show that many of these problems, e.g. scaling graphs, interpolation, interpretation of slope and intercept, persist at third level. We also find a high context-dependence. While our findings concern line graphs in the domain of physics education, they are likely to be much more generally applicable. In this contribution, we classify the difficulties we have identified and identify teaching strategies we applied to help students overcome some of these.