Assessing the use of auditory graphs for middle school mathematics

Abstract

This dissertation addresses issues related to teaching and learning middle-school mathematical graphing concepts and provides an in-depth analysis on the impact of introducing a new assistive technology in a visually impaired classroom. The motivation, design, implementation, and deployment of the Graph and Number line Input and Exploration (GNIE) software, an auditory graphing tool that enables students with visual impairment to navigate and interact with a coordinate plane or number line graph is presented.

Results include a discussion about how a computer-based auditory graphing software can be a beneficial supplement to aiding teachers and students with vision impairment with middle-school based graphing principles. This work also demonstrates that auditory graphing software support collaboration between students of different levels of vision loss and that bone-conduction headphones can be used with software to perform concurrent think aloud protocols without degradation of qualitative data.