RUME 27
2025
Alexandria, Virginia
Graduate Student Instructors’ Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching Inverse Functions and Their Goals for Student Learning
Page: 302
The mathematical meanings that instructors hold necessarily impact the ways that they teach and their goals for student learning. This study examined five graduate student instructors’ (GSIs’) mathematical meanings related to inverse function with the goal of exploring links between their meanings and the meanings they hoped for their students to construct. I found that the GSIs had multiple meanings for inverse functions that were evoked in different contexts, and that they had trouble drawing connections between these meanings when asked about relationships between them. Similarly, their goals for student learning did not include connections between meanings and were additionally constrained by factors such as the departmental curriculum used and the need to adhere to mathematical convention that students were accustomed to.