Experienced secondary teachers’ decisions to attend to the independent variable in exponential functions

Abstract

We report our findings and perspective to document the knowledge exhibited by three experienced high school teachers in their instructional decisions for lessons on the equation of an exponential function. We describe the nature of the mathematical ideas and connections teachers promoted in discourse and the decisions that supported the emergence and connections of the mathematics. Despite similarities in the structure of the mathematical activities, differences existed in the ideas that emerged in the three teachers’ discussions regarding the relationship between the exponent value and the independent variable. We describe links between collections of teacher decisions to their influences on the mathematics discourse.