PROCEEDINGS OF THE 16TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION (Vol 2)
2013
Denver, Colorado
Coherence from Calculus to Differential Equations
Page: 2-83
Recent reform movements, including the Mathematical Association of Amer- ica’s Curriculum Foundations Project, have sought to make calculus courses more coherent with other fields (Hughes Hallet, 2000). Despite this and other interdisciplinary reform efforts, post-calculus instructors still express extreme dissatisfaction with their students’ mathemat- ical preparation (Ferguson, 2012). We do not downplay the importance of the lamentations of other disciplines, but instead suggest that there also exist coherence issues within math- ematics. Our hypothesis is that there is a mismatch between how students are expected to know calculus at the end of a course and how students are required to use calculus in future courses. Specifically, we examine calculus knowledge for differential equations.