This project is a semester long teaching-experiment that examines a holistic and developmental approach of the teaching and learning of functions. The study examines the effectiveness of a teaching-learning intervention of the concept of function and families of functions which is nothing else than the actual curriculum of the Pre-calculus course at UNCC. The concept of function provides the foundation for STEM, business, and other majors because of its fundamental significance in any area of knowledge that has to do with mathematics and statistics. Although this concept is part of the mathematics high school curriculum, students arrive to this course with disconnected meanings. If we can improve students’ conceptualization of functions, then we accomplish an important mission of our department by preparing the recruitment pool for STEM and other majors for future mathematics courses. The project’s teaching-learning intervention includes: (a) scaffolding of the curriculum through tasks that guide inquiry, reading, interpretation, writing, and reflection; it refocuses the traditional course content to emphasize both the concept of function and the invariances of functions across families as well as problem solving in real-world applications; (b) scaffolding students’ involvement on their own learning; and (c) constant academic support for each of the four pretest-test-posttest sequences on each family of functions. We will assess the effectiveness of the above teaching-learning intervention of the concept of function and families of functions through a variety of quantitative measures (scores on all four pretest-test-posttest sequence of tests and the common final exam).
