PROCEEDINGS OF THE 18TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2015
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Students’ reasoning about marginal change in an economic context
Page: 772
This study reports on how ten undergraduate students enrolled in business calculus reasoned about marginal change (marginal cost, marginal revenue, and marginal profit) while engaged in a task-based interview followed by a semi-structured interview. The study had two major findings: (1) students had difficulty distinguishing between marginal cost and approximate marginal cost and (2) students conflated marginal cost and marginal revenue with total cost and total revenue respectively. For future research, we might consider investigating how students’ understanding of marginal change impacts their ability to solve optimization problems situated in the context of cost, revenue, and profit.