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Expect The Unexpected When Teaching Probability, Karen Koellner, Mary Pittman, Jonathan L. Brendefur
Expect The Unexpected When Teaching Probability, Karen Koellner, Mary Pittman, Jonathan L. Brendefur
Curriculum, Instruction, and Foundational Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations
Probability has recently made its way into many textbook series and standards documents (NCTM, 2000; NGA, 2010). When students engage in probability problem solving many unexpected situations can arise due to the counterintuitive nature of probability concepts. These situations can be difficult for students and challenging for teachers to analyse during teaching. Recently, as facilitators of a Mathematics Science Partnership grant workshop on probability, we had the opportunity to engage middle school teachers in professional development workshops as well as in their classrooms. In this article, we discuss a rich probability task used with these teachers along with two scenarios …
A Glimpse Into Secondary Students’ Understanding Of Functions, Jonathan L. Brendefur, Gwyneth Hughes, Robert Ely
A Glimpse Into Secondary Students’ Understanding Of Functions, Jonathan L. Brendefur, Gwyneth Hughes, Robert Ely
Curriculum, Instruction, and Foundational Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations
In this article we examine how secondary school students think about functional relationships. More specifically, we examined seven students’ intuitive knowledge in regards to representing two real-world situations with functions. We found students do not tend to represent functional relationships with coordinate graphs even though they are able to do so. Instead, these students tend to represent the physical characteristics of the situation. In addition, we discovered that middleschool students had sophisticated ideas of dependency and covariance. All the students were able to use their models of the situation to generalize and make predictions. These findings suggest that secondary students …