What is functional thinking? Theoretical considerations and first results of an international interview study

Abstract

In this paper, we present the first results from the Erasmus+ project FunThink which focuses on enhancing functional thinking from primary to upper secondary school. In an international interview study (in Cyprus, Germany, Netherlands, Poland, and Slovakia) we investigated 35 educational experts’ views on what they consider functional thinking to be. From each country between six and nine experts were interviewed. We analyze these semi-structured interviews using qualitative content analysis, with both deductive and inductive categories, related to different conceptualizations of functions, mathematization, activities supporting functional thinking, and cognitive aspects related to functions. These analyses are currently underway; therefore, we present our theoretical background, our coding scheme which is under construction, and excerpts of three interviews in this proposal.