How Students Reason about Changes when Finding Partial Derivatives

Author / Creator

PERC SM21 (2021)

Conferences

PERC SM21 Considering covariational reasoning in math and physics (2021)

Available as

Online

Summary

Partial derivatives are among the many mathematical tools used throughout physics to help describe the physical world. We have been investigating how students are able to determine and interpret pa...

Partial derivatives are among the many mathematical tools used throughout physics to help describe the physical world. We have been investigating how students are able to determine and interpret partial derivatives both symbolically and from contour graphs with mathematical, electrostatic, and thermodynamic contexts. While many students had strong procedural abilities for calculating derivatives, most did not strongly link this process (of finding a partial derivative) with the idea of holding a variable constant, especially when dealing with a thermodynamics context. We found this to be true regardless of the representation in which students were asked to work. These results suggest a deeper theoretical framework is needed for understanding how students think about partial derivatives.

Show More