Dissertation
Towards a Hypothetical Trajectory for the Teaching and Learning of Business and Marginal Functions
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
01/2020
Handle:
https://hdl.handle.net/2376/111474
Abstract
I completed four cycles of data collection and analysis that constituted a Design Based Research project. For this study, I utilized teaching experiments as a didactical in order for students to reinvent the concepts of cost, revenue, profit functions and their respective marginals. My goal was to make applications in business calculus experientially real for students by getting them more involved and active in the learning process and minimizing the usage of non-business- related applications in this course. To achieve this, I combined previous findings from the literature and my own teaching experience to craft a sequence of instructional activities that are supported by specific learning goals. Then, I put them into effect via four teaching experiments over an exploratory cycle, a pilot cycle and two main iterations. Most importantly, I refined the tasks between the cycles based on how students performed: the effectiveness of the proposed tasks was measured by comparing the hypothesized learning to the observations from recordings of students working in groups, and their written solutions. Finally, during the retrospective analysis that followed the second main iteration, I analyzed both the performance of the students during all the phases. This analysis was based on the highlights from the literature that guided the creation of the tasks, and the adopted theoretical frameworks. Subsequently, I generated a learning model of the topics that includes a finalized set of instructional activities, their associated learning goals, and solutions. The model is generated from patterns of reasoning, difficulties, interventions and interactions, amongst others. The final analysis suggests that, while not perfect, the proposed Hypothetical Learning Trajectory and tasks allowed students to meet most of the learning goals.
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Details
- Title
- Towards a Hypothetical Trajectory for the Teaching and Learning of Business and Marginal Functions
- Creators
- Ralph E Chikhany
- Contributors
- William Hall (Advisor)Libby Knott (Committee Member)Sandra Cooper (Committee Member)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- Mathematics and Statistics, Department of
- Theses and Dissertations
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
- Number of pages
- 519
- Identifiers
- 99900581701501842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Dissertation