PROCEEDINGS OF THE 21ST ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2018
San Diego, California
Student Intuition Behind the Chain Rule and How Function Notation Interferes
Page: 1586
Recently, Speer and Kung (2016) informed the RUME community on what was missing from our research. In an effort to begin to fill these gaps in the literature, we explored students conceptual understanding of the chain rule in Calculus I classrooms taught by the first author. In this teaching experiment (Steffe & Thompson, 2000), our preliminary results indicate that if students are afforded opportunities to engage in experientially real tasks (Freudenthal, 1991; Rasmussen & King, 2000) on the chain rule, they understand the purpose it serves and can extend that understanding to varied contexts. However, the largest interference to this understanding was function notation, particularly nested function notation. Implications indicate that the instruction of chain rule could be enhanced by preempting a chain rule unit with nested function notation, while still maintaining tasks centered around a conceptual understanding of the chain rule.