Tangent lines are often first introduced to students in geometry during the study of circles. The topic may be repeatedly reintroduced to students in different contexts throughout their schooling, and often each reintroduction is accompanied by a new, nonequivalent definition of tangent lines. In calculus, tangent lines are again reintroduced to…

The purpose of this paper is to highlight issues related to students' personal inferences that arise when students verbally explain their justification for calculus statements. We conducted clinical interviews with three undergraduate students who had taken first-semester calculus but had not yet been exposed to formal proof writing activities…

Generalization is a critical component of mathematical reasoning, with researchers recommending that it be central to education at all grade levels. However, research on students' generalizing reveals pervasive difficulties in creating and expressing general statements, which underscores the need to better understand the processes that can support…

Research has shown that the types of tasks assigned to students affect their learning. Various authors have described desirable features of mathematical tasks or of the activity they initiate. Others have suggested task taxonomies that might be used in classifying mathematical tasks. Drawing on this literature, we propose a set of task types that…

A few case studies have suggested students' struggles with the "temporal order" of epsilon and delta in the formal limit definition. This study problematizes this hypothesis by exploring students' claims in different contexts and uncovering productive resources from students to make sense of the critical relationship between epsilon and…

In Brazil we have identified a predilection of the authors of Mathematical History books for the discussion of the fundamentals of Differential and Integral Calculus. On the other hand, when we consider the teaching of Mathematics in the school context, it is essential to know the teaching of the historical and dynamic evolution of the concepts,…

This paper explores students' ways of thinking about the average rate of change of a multivariable function and how they generalize those ways of thinking from rate of change of single-variable functions. I found that while students thought about the average rate of change of a multivariable function as the change in the independent quantity with…

Derivatives and integrals are two important concepts of calculus which are precondition topics for most of mathematics courses and other courses in different fields of studies. A majority of students at the undergraduate level have to master derivatives and integrals if they want to be successful in their studies However, students encounter…

A well-known mathematical puzzle regarding a worm crawling along an elastic rope is considered. The resulting generalizations provide examples for use in a teaching context including applications of series summation, the use of the integrating factor for the solution of differential equations, and the evaluation of definite integrals. A number of…

The purpose of this paper is to describe (a) multivariable calculus students' meanings for the domain and range of single and multivariable functions and (b) how they generalize their meanings for domain and range from single-variable to multivariable functions. We first describe how students think about domain and range of multivariable functions…

In this article we examine how secondary school students think about functional relationships. More specifically, we examined seven students' intuitive knowledge in regards to representing two real-world situations with functions. We found students do not tend to represent functional relationships with coordinate graphs even though they are able…

This article discusses the conditions under which all solutions to x[double prime] + q(t)b(x) = f(t) are bounded on [0, [infinite]]. These results are generalizations of the linear case. A short discussion of the properties of bounded oscillatory solutions for both the linear and nonlinear cases when f(t) = 0, xb(x) greater than 0 and b[prime](x)…

This article demonstrates how within an educational context, supported by the notion of hidden mathematics curriculum and enhanced by the use of technology, new mathematical knowledge can be discovered. More specifically, proceeding from the well-known representation of Fibonacci numbers through a second-order difference equation, this article…

In this paper, the author gives a further simple generalization of a power series evaluation of an integral using Taylor series to derive the result. The author encourages readers to consider numerical methods to evaluate the integrals and sums. Such methods are suitable for use in courses in advanced calculus and numerical analysis.

This note contains material to be presented to students in a first course in differential equations immediately after they have completed studying first-order differential equations and their applications. The purpose of presenting this material is four-fold: to review definitions studied previously; to provide a historical context which cites the…