In mathematics, students often encounter various representational formats that are a part of the learning material. These multiple external representations (MERs) often present challenges to students especially if they are unfamiliar with a representation and the information it may depict. This can further present a challenge when the student needs to coordinate information between two (or more) representations of the same concepts. This study examines college students’ ability to solve problems using mathematical functions and the contributions of students’ cross-representational fluency, sense-making, meta-representational competence to students’ mathematics ability. Results show that students’ sense-making with functions mediates the relationship between fluency and mathematics ability. These findings support the conclusion that students’ abilities to work with function representations is associated with their ability to solve problems using these functions.
