The manifestation of graph-theoretic methods in mathematics education research

RUME 26, Omaha, NE, February 2024

Background

This project serves as the preliminary literature review for my Ph.D. dissertation project. It has been published in the Proceedings of the 26th Conference on Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education (Link to Proceedings), and I presented it as a poster at the 26th RUME Conference in Omaha, NE.

Some bullet points:

This suggests that mathematics education researchers are subconsciously thinking about graphs all the time, even if they don't specifically use graph-theoretic methods in their research.

Figures

These trees present the various graph-theoretic methods below in more detail. The most common method used was to consider graphs as "Maps". While both the "Maps" and "Data Visualization" methods involved visualization without mathematical significance, the difference between the two methods is that "Maps" were directly analyzed in some way, whereas "Data Visualization" was the presentation of an analysis that had already been conducted. 

This word cloud visualizes the countries represented by the articles below. In total, 21 countries across 5 continents were represented amongst the 80 publications.

This graph visualizes the relationships among the topics studied by the articles below. Initially, the vertex set was constructed using Open Coding. An edge was drawn between two vertices if a publication involved both topics. The colored vertices are the top seven highest-degree vertices, as determined by Degree Centrality calculations. This gives insight into major themes present amongst topics that have been studied by graph-theoretic methods.

List of Articles Analyzed by Method (SIGMAA-RUME & CERME 2015-2022)

Data Visualization

Flowcharts

Graphs


Grids

Maps

Network Analysis