U.S. Population Growth: What Does the Future Hold? part of Pedagogy in Action:Library:Interactive Lectures:Examples
College Algebra or Liberal Arts math students are presented with a ConcepTest, a Question of the Day and a write-pair-share activity involving U.S. population growth. The results are quite revealing and show that while students may have learned how to perform the necessary calculations, their conceptual understanding concerning exponential growth may remain faulty. Student knowledge (or lack thereof) of the size of our population and its annual growth rate may also be surprising.