Analysis about the treatment of derivative in the textbook of Higher Education

Abstract

This article arose from some concern, mainly from practice to teaching the discipline Differential and Integral Calculus in the Engineering course, especially the derivative, high failure rate and non-association (by the students) of the meaning of the derivative as a Rate of Variation. Our intention is to analyze how the didactic book addresses the introduction of the concept of the derivative with emphasis on the Rate of Variation. We had the contributions of Pino-Fan et al. (2013) on the ideas of the Holistic Sense of the derivative that was reconstructed through the principle of epistemic configuration (CE), identifying their partial meanings. We constructed a framework to analyze the partial meaning of the derivative in the text book by crossing the data of the epistemic configurations (CE) and the problem fields (CP). We conclude that among eight epistemic configurations relating to five problem areas the textbook analyzed opts for the partial meaning of the Derivative as a Limit.