Search

Calculus courses have been attracting the attention of mathematics education researchers over the last decades. Recent publications and special issues dedicated to calculus highlight the diverse roles of calculus courses in the pathways for STEM studies within and across educational levels, as well as issues related to the academic preparation of future STEM professionals, including mathematicians, non-mathematics professionals (NMPs) and teachers. In this paper, we review recent literature, mostly since 2015, to identify and characterize explicit references to such diverse roles of calculus courses. The review highlights an intrinsic tension between two institutional roles of calculus: "scaffolding" and "filtering." We find nuanced yet substantial variation in how the dual role of calculus is experienced and managed across different groups of students and stakeholders. With regard studies on calculus for mathematics students, recent studies attend to changes in the rules underpinning calculus notions and processes, and highlight the scaffolding potential of calculus courses towards abstraction and reasoning. In contrast, studies on calculus for NMPs report that such courses often promote filtering rather than scaffolding and question transferability and relevance of those courses for NMPs. Finally, studies challenge the perception that traditional tertiary calculus courses scaffold school teaching and underline the need for empirical research that would explain the nature of this scaffolding and how it can be realized in practice. We conclude that further empirical research, in particular theory development, is needed to address the diverse roles of calculus at the intersection of institutions, disciplines and communities.

Of the many disciplines that rely on calculus, physics is among those with the strongest connections to this branch of mathematics. For instance, the derivative--one of the key notions of calculus--is used to describe velocity and acceleration, which play a central role in mechanics. In post-secondary education, in particular at the college level, it is not unusual for students to enroll in calculus and mechanics courses in the same year, and even the same term. In mathematics education, however, there is scant research focusing on students' construction of the notion of derivative in a mechanics context, and existing studies offer contradictory views on the effectiveness of using mechanics to teach derivatives. To shed light on the use of derivatives in mechanics and calculus courses, our study focuses on practices involving the use of derivatives to study motion in both courses. We first conducted a praxeological analysis of five differential calculus textbooks and five mechanics textbooks to pinpoint their use of derivatives in the study of motion. This analysis was complemented by interviews with four mathematics teachers and three mechanics teachers, to compare their praxeologies with those of the textbooks. We then identified consistencies and inconsistencies between practices employed in both courses, which may have an impact on students' learning, and formulated recommendations for teaching the notion of derivative in kinematics.

Calculus is a required course in most engineering programmes and is intended to provide students with tools they will use throughout the rest of their training. However, research seems to indicate that calculus is not very prevalent in the engineering workplace or in university engineering courses. To shed some light on how calculus is actually used in engineering programmes, we analysed two courses (Strength of Materials and Electricity and Magnetism) to examine their use of integrals. We first conducted a praxeological analysis examining the introduction of two topics (bending moments and electric potential) in the courses' textbooks before interviewing the teachers of each course to compare their praxeologies with those of the books. Our results show that integrals are used to introduce engineering notions in both courses, with praxeologies that combine elements from mathematics and engineering but that do not call upon calculus techniques to any great extent. Moreover, integrals do not factor highly in students' assessments in either course, which implies that students may pass these courses without any knowledge of integrals as taught in their calculus courses.

In this paper, we examine how differences in the academic and professional backgrounds of engineering teachers shape their personal relationship to the use of mathematics in engineering practices, and whether these differences affect some of their practices. The analyses herein are based on an institutional perspective and employ Chevallard's anthropological theory of the didactic (ATD). We interviewed two teachers in an engineering programme to identify specific elements of their practice that could be attributable to the mobilisation of knowledge and skills derived from their distinct academic backgrounds and experience. The results indicate that the teachers mobilise different tasks, techniques, and technologies in many of their practices, and that they take different approaches to using mathematics and applying rigour.

We examine teachers' use of resources as they prepare to teach the topic of numerical series of real numbers, in order to identify how their "personal relationship" with mathematical content--and its teaching--interacts with their use of a commonly used textbook. We describe this interplay between textbook and personal relationship, a term coined in the Anthropological Theory of the Didactic (ATD, Chevallard, 2003), in terms of "documentation work" ("resources," "aims," "rules of action," "operational invariants"), a key construct from the documentational approach (DA, Gueudet & Trouche, in "Educational Studies in Mathematics," 71, 199-218, 2009). We do so in the case of five post-secondary teachers who use the same textbook as a main resource for teaching the topic. Documentational analysis of interviews with the teachers led to the identification of their aims and rules of action (the "what" and "how" of their resource use as they organise their teaching of the topic) as well as the operational invariants (the "why" for this organisation of their teaching). We describe the teachers' documentation work in two sets of aims/rules of action: scaffolding mathematical content (series as a stepping stone to learning about Taylor polynomials and Maclaurin series), and organising student learning about series through drill exercises, visualisation, examples, and applications. Our bridging (networking) of theoretical constructs originating in one theoretical framework (personal relationship, ATD) with the constructs of a different, yet compatible, framework (documentation work, DA) aims to enrich the latter (teachers' documentation work) with the individual agency (teachers' personal relationships with the topic) provided by the former.

Semiotic representations have been an important topic of study in mathematics education. Previous research implicitly placed more importance on the development of institutional representations of mathematical concepts in students rather than other types of representations. In the context of an extensive research project, in progress since 2005, related to modelling mathematical situations in Québec secondary schools (grades 8 and 9), we have addressed the problem of constructing a specific mathematical concept: covariation between variables as a prerequisite for the concept of function and its graphical representation. However, our research differs from previous studies as we attempt to take into consideration, in a cultural semiotic perspective, the spontaneous non-institutional representations that students produce when solving a problem situation in mathematics. We report our results with a group of students in grade 9, discussing the evolution of the representations the students produced to solve a problem situation, and the key role that the concept of covariation seems to play in helping students grasp the graphical representation of functions. We also discuss the different stages of the teaching method used, based upon collaborative learning, scientific debate and self-reflection (the ACODESA method of teaching) which aims to help the students acquire a cultural semiotic system.

This paper discusses the use of the "Theory of Didactic Situations" (TDS) at university level, paying special attention to the constraints and specificities of its use at this level. We begin by presenting the origins and main tenets of this approach, and discuss how these tenets are used towards the design of "Didactical Engineering" (DE), particularly adapted at the tertiary level. We then illustrate the potency of the TDS-DE approach in three university level "Research Cases," two related to Calculus, and one related to proof. These studies deploy constructs such as "didactic contract," "milieu," "didactic variables," and "epistemological analyses," among others, to design "Situations" at university level. We conclude with a few thoughts on how the TDS-DE approach relates to other approaches, most notably the Anthropological Theory of the Didactic.

In this paper we analyse the introduction of irrational and real numbers in secondary textbooks, and specifically the propositions on how these should be taught, in a sample of Brazilian textbooks used in state schools and approved by the Ministry of Education. The analyses discussed in this paper follow an institutional perspective (using Chevallard's Anthropological Theory of Didactics). Our results indicate that the notion of irrational number is generally introduced on the basis of the decimal representation of numbers, and that the mathematical need for the construction of the field of real numbers remains unclear in the textbooks. It seems that textbooks used in secondary teaching institutions develop mathematical organisations which focus on the "practical" block.

In this paper, we examine how differences in the academic and professional backgrounds of engineering teachers shape their personal relationship to the use of mathematics in engineering practices, and whether these differences affect some of their practices. The analyses herein are based on an institutional perspective and employ Chevallard's anthropological theory of the didactic (ATD). We interviewed two teachers in an engineering programme to identify specific elements of their practice that could be attributable to the mobilisation of knowledge and skills derived from their distinct academic backgrounds and experience. The results indicate that the teachers mobilise different tasks, techniques, and technologies in many of their practices, and that they take different approaches to using mathematics and applying rigour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]