Abstract
The objectives of this research are to assess the performance of engineering stu-dents when using mathematical competences to solve problems with derivatives, to analyze their difficulties, and to observe which secondary school contents are essential for this purpose. The study is descriptive and exploratory with the use of quantitative methods. The participants are students of three competence-based engineering programs of a Chilean University. The results show a limited knowledge of secondary education mathematical contents like algebra, the main mathematical functions, and proportional geometry. The presence of difficulties associated to mathematical thinking processes and the complexity of mathematical objects are also evident. However, everyday problems in an artificial or fantasy context were more appealing for students, who solved most of them correctly. Even though these problems are imaginary, they were formulated using situations that engineering students face every day.
Highlights
IntroductionSeveral studies in the field have address the problem of improving teaching practices with the implementation of pedagogical strategies aimed at overcoming student's difficulties with the understanding of concepts like limits, derivatives, and integrals [2,3,4,5,6,7]
The scope of Mathematics Education goes from the most basic mathematical notions to the complex mathematics taught in Universities
This is a quantitative study of exploratory natures, since the addressed problem has been poorly studied in our current competence-based curricular context. It is of descriptive nature, as well, [46] since it analyzes point to point the role of problem solving in the process of learning of the derivative
Summary
Several studies in the field have address the problem of improving teaching practices with the implementation of pedagogical strategies aimed at overcoming student's difficulties with the understanding of concepts like limits, derivatives, and integrals [2,3,4,5,6,7]. Even though different Calculus courses may have different objectives in higher education, all of them are mainly centred on algorithms and traditional methods of mathematics teaching [8]. With these methods students manage to be able to use integrals, derivatives, and basic limits, but they are unable to extrapolate these notions to a wider context. The mechanical methods by which they were taught prevail [9]
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