PROCEEDINGS OF THE 18TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2015
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
An intended meaning for the argument of a function
Page: 470
This poster describes an intended meaning for the argument of a function when reasoning about a function covariationally. An instructional investigation was designed to promote this meaning with students in a college-level precalculus course using an instructional task and a didactic object relating to modeling the relationship between the time elapsed since Tommy threw a rock off of a bridge in seconds and the height above a lake in feet of the rock. Students were formally introduced to the term argument after the task and asked to evaluate and explain the meaning of functions defined with an argument as the function input. After engaging with the task, these students demonstrated larger learning gains than students in previous studies on the same questions that involved evaluating a function for an argument expression.