Shed New Light on Student Thinking with a Representational Lens

Our day-to-day activities are increasingly saturated with static and dynamic representations. These "things" that stand for something else are especially ubiquitous in our mathematics classrooms-in the minds of our students, on the screens of handheld and desktop technologies, recorded on the board, and printed on the pages of textbooks. How can this plethora of information in various mediums be processed to form a coherent mathematical story? In this piece we will venture to see how research can inform our view of student thinking from a representational lens on teaching and learning.