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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 …
Using Solution Strategies To Examine And Promote High School Students’ Understanding Of Exponential Functions: One Teacher’S Attempt, Jonathan L. Brendefur, Kim Bunning, Walter G. Secada
Using Solution Strategies To Examine And Promote High School Students’ Understanding Of Exponential Functions: One Teacher’S Attempt, Jonathan L. Brendefur, Kim Bunning, Walter G. Secada
Curriculum, Instruction, and Foundational Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations
Much research has been conducted on how elementary students develop mathematical understanding and subsequently how teachers might use this information. This article builds on this type of work by investigating how one high-school algebra teacher designs and conducts a lesson on exponential functions. Through a lesson study format she studies with her colleagues how other algebra students have mathematically modeled a bacteria growth problem with no prior formal instruction. Analysis revealed that the teacher was able to use students’ algebraic thinking to structure her class and begin promoting mathematical understanding. The implications for building on students’ conceptions of algebra are …