PROCEEDINGS OF THE 16TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION (Vol 2)
2013
Denver, Colorado
Students’ Way of Thinking about Derivative and its correlation to their ways of solving applied problems
Page: 2-492
Previous researchers have examined students’ understanding of derivative and their difficulties in solving applied problems and/or their difficulties in applying the basic knowledge of derivative in different contexts. There has not been much research approaching students’ ways of thinking about derivative through the lens of applied questions. In this research, first I categorized the students’ way of thinking about the basic concept of derivative by running a survey of questions addressing the different ways of thinking about derivative based on the existing research works. While analyzing these surveys, I used grounded theory and added more ways of thinking about derivative. I specially noticed very incomplete ways of thinking about derivative as described below. Since my goal was looking at the students’ ways of thinking about derivative through the lenses of applied questions, I also piloted my applied questions survey with 51 multivariable calculus students. I noticed a lot of students struggling with defining variables (the initial translation as described below) and if they could define the variable, a lot of them struggled on applying their ways of thinking about derivative into solving the applied problem. These difficulties are great venues to study their ways of thinking about derivative using their struggle in the applied questions. This is a summary of my initial works on this ongoing research, the goal of which is to shed new insights into students’ solving of applied problems.