Investigating students’ perception of the importance of calculus: a cross-discipline comparison to inform module development

Abstract

This study compares perceptions of calculus across disciplines in university education. As highlighted by Rasmussen et al. (2014) further work is needed to understand the “relationship between calculus and the client disciplines of engineering, physics, biology, and chemistry”, with calculus courses often designed from the perspective of Mathematicians. Here, we aim to give insight of when it is appropriate to group such disciplines together for taught calculus modules in Higher Education (HE).This short study assesses how students perceive the importance of calculus across disciplines including Mathematics, Electronic Engineering, Economics and Business.Specifically, we consider the following: 1) Are there differences in how students from different disciplines perceive the importance of studying calculus? 2) Do students view the field of calculus as: something to be learned to pass their course; something to be fully understood; or a tool for future study/career? Whilst this small study cannot answer these important, open questions, overall it does reveal that students in Mathematics and Economics have similar perceptions about calculus, whereas, Business students viewed calculus significantly differently to the other disciplines. Therefore, these results give some initial indications of appropriate groupings for cross teaching calculus, and importantly give an area of focus for which further research should develop, regarding how these grouping would affect attainment, pass rates and other phenomena noted in HE calculus modules