ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.
In addition to the electronic theses found in the ASU Digital Repository, ASU Theses and Dissertations can be found in the ASU Library Catalog.
Dissertations and Theses granted by Arizona State University are archived and made available through a joint effort of the ASU Graduate College and the ASU Libraries. For more information or questions about this collection contact or visit the Digital Repository ETD Library Guide or contact the ASU Graduate College at gradformat@asu.edu.
Filtering by
- All Subjects: Mathematics
- Creators: Saldanha, Luis
- Creators: Al-Suleiman, Sultan
The first paper reports an investigation of 251 high school mathematics teachers’ meanings for slope, measurement, and rate of change. Most teachers conveyed primarily additive and formulaic meanings for slope and rate of change on written items. Few teachers conveyed that a rate of change compares the relative sizes of changes in two quantities. Teachers’ weak measurement schemes were associated with limited meanings for rate of change. Overall, the data suggests that rate of change should be a topics of targeted professional development.
The second paper reports the quantitative part of a mixed method study of 153 calculus students at a large public university. The majority of calculus students not only have weak meanings for fraction, measure, and constant rates but that having weak meanings is predictive of lower scores on a test about rate of change functions. Regression is used to determine the variation in student success on questions about rate of change functions (derivatives) associated with variation in success on fraction, measure, rate, and covariation items.
The third paper investigates the implications of two students’ fraction schemes for their understanding of rate of change functions. Students’ weak measurement schemes obstructed their ability to construct a rate of change function given the graph of an original function. The two students did not coordinate three levels of units, and struggled to relate partitioning and iterating in a way that would help them reason about fractions, rate of change, and rate of change functions.
Taken as a whole the studies show that the majority of secondary teachers and calculus students studied have weak meanings for foundational ideas and that these weaknesses cause them problems in making sense of more applications of rate of change.
is the subposet of An induced by the c-sortable elements, and the m-eralized Cambrian
lattice corresponding to c, denoted Cambm(c), is dened as a subposet of the
braid group accompanied with the right weak ordering induced by the c-sortable elements
under certain conditions. Both of these families generalize the well-studied
Tamari lattice Tn rst introduced by D. Tamari in 1962. S. Fishel and L. Nelson
enumerated the chains of maximum length of Tamari lattices.
In this dissertation, I study the chains of maximum length of the Cambrian and
m-eralized Cambrian lattices, precisely, I enumerate these chains in terms of other
objects, and then nd formulas for the number of these chains for all m-eralized
Cambrian lattices of A1, A2, A3, and A4. Furthermore, I give an alternative proof
for the number of chains of maximum length of the Tamari lattice Tn, and provide
conjectures and corollaries for the number of these chains for all m-eralized Cambrian
lattices of A5.