PROCEEDINGS OF THE 19TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2016
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Transforming graduate students’ meanings for average rate of change
Page: 1174
This report offers a brief conceptual analysis of average rate of change (AROC) and shares evidence that even mathematically sophisticated mathematics graduate students struggle to speak fluently about AROC. We offer data from clinical interviews with graduate teaching assistants who participated in at least one semester of a professional development intervention designed to support mathematics graduate students in developing deep and connected meanings of key ideas of precalculus level mathematics as part of a broader intervention to support mathematics graduate students in teaching ideas of precalculus mathematics meaningfully to students. The results revealed that the post-intervention graduate students describe AROC more conceptually than their pre-intervention counterparts, but many still struggle to verbalize a meaning for AROC beyond average speed, a geometric interpretation based on the slope of a secant line, or a computation.