A growing body of literature has identified quantitative and covariational reasoning as critical for secondary and undergraduate student learning, particularly for topics that require students to make sense of relationships between quantities. The present study extends this body of literature by characterizing an undergraduate precalculus…

Science and engineering instructors often observe that students have difficulty using or applying prerequisite mathematics knowledge in their courses. This qualitative project uses a case-study method to investigate the instruction in a trigonometry course and a physics course based on a different methodology and set of assumptions about student…

In this article students' understanding of trigonometric functions in the context of two college trigonometry courses is investigated. The first course was taught by a professor unaffiliated with the study in a lecture-based course, while the second was taught using an experimental instruction paradigm based on Gray and Tall's (1994) notion of…