Calculus is perhaps the most widely taught and researched upper-secondary/post-secondary mathematics subject the world over. The research literature is amassing greater clarity around students' understandings of calculus, yet calculus instruction tends to be at odds with this literature, maintaining a focus on procedural aspects of the subject.…

The objective of this research is to study if the use of the calculator decreases students' anxiety in the subject of differential and integral calculus. Specifically, the research is carried out with 30 engineering students. Auzmendi anxiety factor questions are used to measure anxiety. The study is carried out in two moments; in the first the…

The present paper explores the relationship between attitudes towards mathematics (ATM) and achievement in college calculus in active learning (AL) and lecture-based (LB) classrooms. Previous work on this relationship has mainly been limited to LB instruction, neglecting the impact of innovative approaches such as AL. Less attention has been paid…

Background: The demand for professionals with expertise in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) continues to grow. To meet this demand, universities are actively seeking strategies to engage more students in STEM disciplines and improve their learning outcomes. One promising approach is gamification, specifically using…

Research into didactics of calculus has maintained a long-standing interest in students' grasp of the relations between definite integrals and areas. This study comes to contribute to this line of research by unpacking how students use the concept of area to find definite integrals. Specifically, we focus on mathematical situations where the…

In introductory math courses such as precalculus, students often have difficulty with assignments that require explanations or synthesizing knowledge. When students receive low scores on such assignments, instructors often wish to help students understand the material they struggled with. A common strategy is to allow the students to revise and…

Mathematics provides us with tools to capture and explain phenomena in everyday biology, even at the nanoscale. The most regularly applied technique to biology is differential equations. In this article, we seek to present how differential equation models of biological phenomena, particularly the flow through ion channels, can be used to motivate…

Using the sawtooth map as the basis of a coupled map lattice enables simple analytic results to be obtained for the global Lyapunov spectra of a number of standard lattice networks. The results presented can be used to enrich a course on chaos or dynamical systems by providing tractable examples of higher dimensional maps and links to a number of…

The growing adoption of active learning pedagogical methods has shown significant positive effects in higher education as they promote students' engagement and meeting of learning outcomes. Similarly, problem-based learning and media-based learning allow instructors to model educational experiences that prepare students with knowledge and skills…

This study investigates when and how university students in first-semester introductory calculus interpret multiple representations of the same function. Specifically, it focuses on three tasks. The first task has students give their definitions of 'function sameness', the results of which suggests that many students understand a function as being…

We have introduced a novel approach to competency-based education in mechatronics from the undergraduate to the postgraduate level. What distinguishes this approach is the integration of modeling and control of sampled systems right from the beginning of the undergraduate education. It is achieved by changing the structure of the first-semester…

University students increasingly watch animated math videos that use dynamic visualizations as part of their learning process. Despite students' positive appreciation, little is known about how these visualizations contribute to learning outcomes. This paper examines the relationship between learning outcomes and students' experiences with dynamic…

This paper describes a project assigned in a multivariable calculus course. The project showcases many fundamental concepts studied in a typical course, including the distance formula, equations of lines and planes, intersection of planes, Lagrange multipliers, integrals in both Cartesian and polar coordinates, parametric equations, and arc length.

Through galleries of graphs and short filmstrips, this paper aims to sharpen students' eyes for visually recognizing continuous functions. It seeks to develop intuition for what visual features of a graph continuity does and does not allow for. We have found that even students who can work correctly with rigorous definitions may not be able to…

This short note discusses how the optimality conditions for minimizing a multivariate function subject to equality constraints have been covered in some undergraduate Calculus courses. In particular, we will focus on the most common optimization problems in Calculus of several variables: the 2 and 3-dimensional cases. So, along with sufficient…