Justifications Students Use when Writing an Equation during a Modeling Task

Literature typically describes mathematization, the process of transforming a real-world situation into a mathematical model, in terms of desirable actions and behaviors students exhibit. We attended to STEM undergraduate students' quantitative reasoning as they derived equations. Analysis of the meanings they held for arithmetic operations (+, -, ·, ÷) provided insight into how participants expressed real-world relationships among entities with arithmetic relationships among values. We extend the findings from K-12 literature (e.g., using multiplication to instantiate a rate) to STEM undergraduates and found evidence of new ways of justifying the usage of arithmetic operations (e.g., using multiplication to instantiate an amount). [For the complete proceedings, see ED630210.]