Saturday

11:35 – 12:05 pm

Session 23 – Mixed Reports

Marquis A

Opportunity to learn solving context-based tasks provided by business calculus textbooks: An exploratory study

Thembinkosi Mkhatshwa and Helen Doerr

The purpose of this study was to investigate the opportunities to learn how to solve realistic context-based problems that undergraduate business calculus textbooks in the United States offer to business and/or economics students. To do this, we selected and analyzed six different textbooks that are widely used in the teaching of business calculus nationwide. There are three major findings from this study: (1) a majority of the tasks in all the textbooks uses a camouflage context, (2) all the tasks in all the textbooks have matching information, and (3) only three textbooks had reflection tasks. The findings of this suggest that business calculus textbooks do not offer students rich and sufficient opportunities to learn how to solve realistic problems in a business and/or economic context.

Paper

3

Marquis B

StudentsÕ conceptualizations and representations of how two quantitiesÕ change together

Kristin Frank

In this article I discuss the nature of two university precalculus studentsÕ meanings for functions and graphs. I focus on the ways in which these meanings influence how these students reasoned about and represented how two quantities change together. My analysis revealed that a student who views a graph as a static shape and does not see a graph as a representation of how two quantities change together will not be successful in constructing meaningful graphs, even in instances when she is able to reason about two quantities changing together. Students made progress in seeing graphs as emergent representations of how two quantities change together when they conceptualized the point (x,y) as a multiplicative object that represented the relationship between an x and y value.

Paper

77

Marquis C

Classroom culture, technology, & modeling: A case study of studentsÕ engagement with statistical ideas

Dana Kirin, Jennifer Noll and Erin Glover

Advances in technologies have changed the way statisticians do their work, as well as how people receive and process information. The case study presented here follows two groups of two students who participated in a reform-oriented curriculum that utilized technology to engage students with modeling and simulation activities to develop their statistical literacy, thinking, and reasoning. Our analysis applies a social theory of learning and a framework for student engagement as a means for studying studentsÕ development of statistical reasoning. In addition, we investigate the impact of a curriculum focused on modeling and simulation on the development of studentsÕ statistical reasoning skills.

Paper

105