An Exponential Growth Learning Trajectory: Students' Emerging Understanding of Exponential Growth Through Covariation


Ellis A. B., Ozgur Z., Kulow T., Dogan M. F., Amidon J.

MATHEMATICAL THINKING AND LEARNING, cilt.18, sa.3, ss.151-181, 2016 (SSCI) identifier

  • Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
  • Cilt numarası: 18 Sayı: 3
  • Basım Tarihi: 2016
  • Doi Numarası: 10.1080/10986065.2016.1183090
  • Dergi Adı: MATHEMATICAL THINKING AND LEARNING
  • Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Scopus
  • Sayfa Sayıları: ss.151-181
  • Dokuz Eylül Üniversitesi Adresli: Hayır

Özet

This article presents an Exponential Growth Learning Trajectory (EGLT), a trajectory identifying and characterizing middle grade students' initial and developing understanding of exponential growth as a result of an instructional emphasis on covariation. The EGLT explicates students' thinking and learning over time in relation to a set of tasks and activities developed to engender a view of exponential growth as a relation between two continuously covarying quantities. Developed out of two teaching experiments with early adolescents, the EGLT identifies three major stages of students' conceptual development: prefunctional reasoning, the covariation view, and the correspondence view. The learning trajectory is presented along with three individual students' progressions through the trajectory as a way to illustrate the variation present in how the participants made sense of ideas about exponential growth.