Abstract
This paper will examine students’ reasoning with conceptual problems in signals and systems, a subfield of electrical engineering. In particular, we study how students consider multiple representations that model real phenomena. Also, signals and systems problems require students to think about multiple representations of the same signal, namely interpreting amplitude variation as a function of time and energy variation as a function of frequency. We aim to understand how students connect representations across different domains for the same signal. We adapt a framework to describe representational contexts and process-objects to signal and systems concepts. While some of these mathematical applications are unique to electrical engineering, this provides one example of exploring students’ concept images that include applications of mathematics.