An Assessment of How Engineering Students Partially Understand Derivatives through Six Cognitive Tasks
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15517/revedu.v49i2.542Keywords:
Derivatives, Engineering Education, Calculus, UnderstandingAbstract
This article reports on the findings attained from a questionnaire to assess learning difficulties encountered by engineering students regarding concepts about derivatives. The questionnaire was distributed to eleven students enrolled in the industrial, civil, and automation engineering programs. Analysis of the responses utilized theoretical and methodological concepts from the Ontosemiotic Approach (OSA) to Mathematical Knowledge and Instruction. Based on the results, 55% of students demonstrated comprehension of derivatives as a rate of change and preferred the algebraic representation. Final recommendations are provided regarding tasks that should be integrated into calculus courses to strengthen the training of engineering students.
Downloads
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Revista Educación - Journal of Education
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
All articles published, are protected by a Creative Commons 4.0 International License (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike). See this license at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/deed.en
Open Access Policy
This is an open access journal, which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or users, or institution. The users can read, download, copy, distribute, print, and search the articles in this journal without asking prior permission from the publisher or author for educational purposes and not for profit.
