“Like finding the acceleration”: A praxeological analysis of a calculus/mechanics task with and without its physics context

Overview & Synopsis

Although mechanics and calculus are strongly related disciplines and share common objects, like the derivative, students do not always seem capable of leveraging the knowledge they acquire in studying one discipline when solving tasks in the other. In this paper, we continue our study of pairs of ‘similar’ tasks, a task from physics and the same task set in a pure calculus context, to analyse students’ learning of the derivative in these two contexts. Our results indicate that students have difficulties identifying that, beneath the context, the two tasks are essentially the same. On the one hand, this hinders students from using simpler algebra-based techniques from physics to solve the calculus task, while on the other, it favours the mobilisation of richer rationales.