Attending to Quantities Through the Modelling Space

Understanding students’ modelling processes is critical for informing facilitator interventions. More specifically, it is important for facilitators to understand the situation-specific attributes students find relevant in modelling tasks, if and how these are manifested in their inscriptions, and when students’ situation-specific meanings for inscriptions change while engaged in modelling. In this chapter, we present a theoretically coherent methodological approach for attending to the aforementioned features. Our approach foregrounds the quantities projected by students when engaged in modelling, as well as attends to the situation-specific quantitative referents for their mathematical inscriptions. We illustrate the utility of this approach by analysing the modelling activities of a purposefully selected undergraduate student and consider implications for future research.