| Summary: | The Portuguese secondary school mathematics curriculum draws on results of
research conducted in the Mathematics Education field to stress the
importance of teaching mathematical concepts using, whenever possible, their
different representations. Numerical, analytical and graphical approaches to
the teaching of the derivative concept are indicated as essential to enhance
conceptual meanings and relations. However, in general, students show a preference for analytical approaches in detriment of the graphical one, which
may be the result of predominantly analytical teaching approaches. In this
context, the goal of this study was to investigate mathematics student teachers
difficulties in interpreting and relating the graphs of a function and those of their
derivatives. A questionnaire about graphical representations of the derivative
of a function was applied to 19 mathematics student teachers and an
interpretative analysis of the results was performed.
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