Precedents and explorative participation in mathematical discourse

The paper examines the case of Carlo, a low-achieving student, who participated in a remedial intervention in which he worked with one- and two-dimensional representations of functions in a digital environment. Using a commognitive lens, we analyze two episodes involving task situations that an expert would recognize as similar, but that Carlo approached differently. Our broad aim is to explore how previously learned mathematics can interfere with remedial interventions, such as the one in focus.