Students’ Ways Of Thinking About Rate Of Change

Rate of change is an important subject for understanding functions. In fact rate of change can be thought as a function itself. Because reasoning about rate of change of one quantity with respect to another quantity is the basis of the function concept. The aim of this research is to determine the 8th graders’ ways of thinking about the rate of change. The data were gathered using a teaching experiment methodology. The tasks used within teaching experiment were formed to explain students understanding rate of change. The results show that students’ ways of thinking can be categorized as non-quantitative rate of change and quantitative rate of change. After completing the teaching experiment, the students moved from non-quantitative to quantitative rate of change