Implications of Faster/Slower Language on Undergraduate Precalculus Students' Graphing

Researchers have recommended using tasks that support students in reasoning covariationally to build productive meanings for graphs, rates of change, exponential growth, and more. However, not many recent studies have been done to identify how students reason when engaging in covariational reasoning tasks in undergraduate precalculus courses. In this study, I analyze submitted classwork, including video submissions of that work, in an applied precalculus undergraduate course. In comparing current literature on students' covariational reasoning with these students' responses, there is some overlap that this study provides additional insights to, and there are also unique ways of reasoning these students exhibited tied to understanding the steepness of slope as being associated with ideas of speed. This study contributes to knowledge about how students develop covariational reasoning. [For the complete proceedings, see ED658295.]