RUME 26
2024
Omaha, Nebraska
An Exploration of Precalculus Students’ Reasoning About Exponential Functions
Page: 1371
In recent years both the teaching and learning of introductory mathematics courses, such as Precalculus, have made immense strides to improve students’ understanding of foundational skills such as covariational reasoning (e.g., Thompson & Carlson, 2017). Despite the emphasis being placed on teaching from a covariational lens, exponential functions continue to be taught from a correspondence lens (Ellis et al., 2016). In other words, the focus is on solving an algebraic expression that defines a static relationship between two variables instead of the underlying covariational relationship between two quantities. This work is a subset of a larger project to support students’ covariational reasoning and specifically focuses on exponential functions. We are guided by the following questions: What type of covariational reasoning is present in students’ responses on exponential growth/decay questions? How do the students’ responses align (or not) with the mathematical goals of each lab?