Contextualizing Calculus with Everyday Examples to enhance conceptual learning Abstract Many engineering students in most western countries have difficulties passing the initial mathematics courses. Teachers complain that students are ill prepared in pre- calculus and even the best students only can solve standard problems using standard procedures. The aim of teaching in mathematics is to develop deep understanding and conceptually trained students who creatively can solve unforeseen problems. But how do you educate such students? The answer is not given. The adopted approach in this study is to introduce contextualized teaching of mathematics trough everyday examples to scaffold students develop the conceptual understanding sought for. The general idea is to start from the most concrete examples, everyday examples, and work the way towards more abstract mathematics. Everyday examples are examples that can instantly be understood by the students based on life experience only. Each new concept in the course is introduced, verbally, numerically, graphically and algebraically. Everyday examples are introduced in the verbal phase of the sequence. The root of the problem of students´ unpreparedness in mathematics is hypothetically to be sought in the decontextualized abstract teaching. Everyday examples were introduced in in the first calculus course of an engineering program with 160 students during the fall off 2012. The results of course exam show that the students succeeded somewhat better than the control groups. And most importantly everyday examples played a major role in their developing conceptual understanding and were found to be motivating. Results from a diagnostic test and the exam are used as quantitative data and qualitative data are gathered by questionnaires. A pragmatic theory of meaning based on Wittgenstein’s language theory is used to analyse the construction of knowledge in mathematics.
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Gaidi et al. (2015) studied this question.