PROCEEDINGS OF THE 16TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION (Vol 2)
2013
Denver, Colorado
Rethinking Business Calculus in the Era of Spreadsheets
Page: 2-575
The author is writing an electronic “book” to support the teaching of calculus to business students with the assumption that they will use a spreadsheet as their main computational engine. With the change in technology, it is appropriate to rethink the content of the course, as a different technology makes different tasks accessible. This study looks at what the content of the course should be. It compares the official learning objects of the course, with de facto learning objectives obtained by analyzing final exams from 20 sections of the course, and with the results of a survey of the faculty of the business school, the client discipline. It is intended that this preliminary study will establish a baseline that can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of the new approach to the course.