Work in Progress: What Calculus Do Students Learn
After Calculus?
Andrew Bennett and Todd Moore
Department of Mathematics
Kansas State University
Manhattan, KS, USA
bennett@math.ksu.edu
Abstract— Clinical interviews were held with students in senior
level electrical engineering and methods of teaching secondary
mathematics classes. These students had all completed a 4-
semester calculus sequence including differential equations.
Engineering students had then taken advanced classes applying
mathematical ideas in real-world contexts while mathematics
education students had taken a similar amount of coursework in
advanced mathematics courses. Students were interviewed to
determine how their conceptual understanding of function and
accumulation (integration) had grown or regressed during work
after calculus. Back-transfer, where later learning improves
conceptual understanding of earlier material, was observed.
Keywords-component; back transfer; APOS; function;
acculumation; understanding
I. INTRODUCTION
There have been numerous studies looking at the concept of
transfer, where material learned in one course is available (or
not) for application in later courses (for a variety of examples
of such studies, see chapter 3 of [1]). The idea of transfer
underlies much of the structure of the modern engineering
curriculum, where students begin in calculus and physics and
then apply that knowledge in later work. Much less studied is
back-transfer, where seeing material in a later course deepens
understandings of concepts that could have been developed in
an earlier course [2]. A proper understanding of how engineers’
conceptual understanding develops throughout their training
requires an understanding of how both transfer and back-
transfer work. The research questions addressed in this study
are:
• Does back transfer occur?
• If so, does the application of math in different contexts
lead to different levels of back transfer?
This study focuses on the concepts of function and
accumulation (integration) as developed in calculus. However,
a better understanding of back transfer in mathematics should
provide a guide to the study of transfer and back-transfer in
other aspects of the engineering curriculum.
978-1-4673-1352-0/12/$31.00 ©2012 IEEE
II. METHODOLOGY
A. Subjects
This study builds on earlier research about the level of
conceptual understanding exhibited by students at the end of a
4-semester math sequence, Calculus 1, 2, 3, and Differential
Equations [3]. The participants consisted of 20 senior-level
engineering majors and nine senior-level mathematics
education majors. Each group was selected from their classes in
the Spring semester of 2011. The engineering majors were
recruited from ECE 512: Linear Systems in the College of
Engineering. The mathematics education majors were
recruited from MATH 570: History of Mathematics in the
Mathematics Department. These groups were selected because
students in both groups had completed the same 4-course
sequence, typically during their first two years of college, and
had both taken additional courses which used that material
afterward. However, the engineering students had seen the
calculus ideas applied in more real-world settings than the
education majors, few of whom took any additional science
courses and instead primarily looked at more abstract
applications in advanced math courses. By comparing the
conceptual understanding displayed by the seniors to that
displayed by sophomores, back transfer could be assessed. By
comparing engineering and education majors, the role of
different contexts of application could also be assessed.
B. Interviews
Each student participated in a (roughly) 60 minute clinical
interview. Interviews were conversation-style following a
protocol with predetermined questions along with spontaneous,
related follow-up questions determined by the course of the
interview to get at understanding. Questions were taken mostly
from the level of Calculus I and II with two questions coming
from Differential Equations. The questions were chosen based
on whether each would demonstrate a student’s understanding
of various calculus concepts including function, differentiation,
and integration. For example, the interview questions included:
Graph x(t) = cos t, y(t) = sin t, 0 ≤ t ≤ 2π
Graph x(t) = cos 2t, y(t) = sin 2t, 0 ≤ t ≤ π
Are these the same functions?
 The researchers were not specifically interested in the
“correctness” of the student responses. However these
questions lead easily to a discussion of ideas about what it
means to be a function, from which the students’ understanding
of the concept could be assessed.
C. Analysis
Interviews were transcribed and analyzed using both
qualitative and quantitative techniques.
1) First pass (qualitative)
After each interview, students were rated on their level of
conceptual understanding of function and accumulation. These
ratings were based on a modified Action-Process-Object-
Schema (APOS) scale that was refined to admit intermediate
levels between each of the normal Action, Process, Object and
Schema levels (see [4] for details about the APOS scale). A
student was rated by the researchers by analyzing how they
answered the series of questions in the interview and deciding
to what level a student could think about a particular topic. A
student would be rated at a particular level if the researchers
felt that the student could think about a topic and operate
within a problem at that level. The rating was not an indication
to which level a student would naturally operate when
answering a question but rather an indication of the highest
level a student could reasonably operate when answering a
question.
The overall rating for each student was assigned based on a
composite of the student’s individual ratings on each question.
Once all students had been rated, the percent of engineering
majors and the percent of mathematics education majors at
each level were compared to results after Differential Equations
to see if seniors demonstrated deeper understanding (showing
back transfer) or lesser understanding (demonstrating forgetting
of basic concepts).
2) Second pass (quantitative)
As a check to prevent the preconceptions of the researchers
from blinding them to ideas expressed by the students, we also
used a quantitative data-mining approach to analyzing the
interview data. The transcriptions were used to create a matrix
where each entry was the total number of times each student
said each word. So the sixth entry in the eighth row would be
the number of times the eighth student said the sixth most
commonly used word from the interviews. A non-negative
matrix factorization was then used on the resulting “word bags”
to identify different vocabularies used by different students.
The researchers were somewhat surprised when the
vocabularies did not indicate differences between different
majors, but did identify groups based on words linked to
confidence or willingness to participate in answering questions
when they weren’t sure of the answer such as “don’t” and
“know”, “understand”, etc.
3) Third pass (qualitative)
Once the quantitative analysis suggested student
confidence in dealing with questions where they were unsure
of the answer was important, the interviews were divided into
segments of information (sentences or phrases as appropriate)
and coded for topic, level of understanding, current
representation, confidence, and willingness to participate.
These codes were then used by the researchers to rate each
interview with an average level of confidence and willingness
from 1 to 3 using half steps so that they would be more
comparable to the rating of the student’s level of
understanding on the modified APOS scale.
III. PRELIMINARY RESULTS
Senior students had, on average, progressed along the
APOS scale farther than students at the end of the calculus
sequence. However, not all students exhibited growth. Indeed,
some students never advanced past the initial Action level
during their entire college career. So in answer to research
question 1, back transfer can occur, but is not guaranteed.
While engineers overall displayed higher levels of
conceptual understanding than education majors, we are unable
to conclude that exposure to more concrete applications was
better at supporting back transfer than the more abstract
applications of advanced mathematics classes. Variations
within the majors were larger than variations between the
majors, which suggests that the nature of the student rather than
the application is the most important variable in supporting
back transfer. Of course, self-selection of students into majors
complicates this analysis.
Finally, the coding for confidence demonstrated that
engineering majors were in general more willing to try
problems when they didn’t know how to work them. Again,
self-selection is an issue here. But it appears that in comparing
practical vs. abstract extensions of mathematical ideas, the
difference lies less in terms of supporting back transfer and
more in terms of developing confidence to persist in problem
solving in the face of uncertainty.
IV. FUTURE WORK
Additional research will need to be done to identify what
conditions support development of conceptual understanding
in general, and back transfer in particular. It seems clear from
the preliminary results that these conditions depend not just on
the type of application but also on the student. This involves
not just their academic abilities, but also their attitudes,
especially toward working with problems where the solution
technique is not immediately obvious. The connections
between transfer, back transfer, self-efficacy, and conceptual
understanding are not currently well understood.
REFERENCES
[1] J. Bransford, A. Brown, and R. Cocking (eds.), How People Learn:
Brain, Mind, Experience, and School, National Academy Press,
Washington, DC, 2000, pp. 51-78.
[2] C. Hohensee, Backwards transfer: How mathematical understanding
changes as one builds upon it, Doctoral Dissertation, San Diego State
University, 2011.
[3] A. Bennett, X. Nguyen, and T. Moore, “A longitudinal study on students
development and transfer of the concept of integration,” Proc. Amer.
Soc. Eng. Ed., Vancouver, BC, 2011.
[4] E. Dubinsky and M. McDonald, “APOS: A constructivist theory of
learning in undergraduate matheamtics education,” in D. Holton (ed.),
The Teaching and Learning of Mathematics at University Level: An
ICMI Study. Series: New ICMI Study Series, vol. 7 (pp. 273-280),
Dordrechet: Kluwer.