PROCEEDINGS OF THE 20TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2017
San Diego, California
Locating a realistic starting point for the guided reinvention of limit at infinity with community college students prior to pre-calculus
Page: 1324
In this paper, I describe a teaching experiment conducted with a pair of undergraduate studentsat a two-year community college. My primary goal was to explore a realistic starting point forthe guided reinvention of the concept of limit at infinity for students who had not yet studiedlimits. The teaching experiment included 5 weekly hour-long sessions in which the two studentswere presented with tasks that involved describing the behavior of certain real-worldphenomena. The initial analysis revealed that these students showed ways of thinking thatanticipate the formal concept of limit at infinity. Further analysis will be used to develop anappropriate instructional sequence with a realistic starting point to be used in future teachingexperiments in which students will be engaged in the guided reinvention of a formal definition oflimit at infinity.Key words