2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Improving STEM students’ ability to interrelate multiple calculus concepts is one of the key elements of mathematics education. One way of analyzing this ability is to utilize multiple calculus sub-concepts in calculus questions and apply pedagogical techniques to the analysis of the empirical data. Power series is a concept that requires knowledge of extensive calculus sub-conceptual knowledge that includes rate of change and antiderivative knowledge. Pedagogical efforts to measure conceptual understanding of STEM students’ power series expansion and improving the teaching of these concepts is recent ([1]-[9].) If and only if (Iff) is one of the pedagogical techniques introduced in [10] to analyze calculus questions and educators are encouraged to use this technique to structure questions. In this work, we utilize iff methodology introduced in [10] and analyze empirical data collected at a university located on the Northeastern side of the United States. The research received Institutional Review Board Approval (IRB) to collect written and interview data from 17 engineering students on two research questions. Written and video recorded information is collected and analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively to understand engineering students’ ability to solve the two questions that are related to function, derivative, integral, and power series concepts. The written results indicated 30% of the participants ability to form a bridge between derivative, integral, power series and function concepts by answering the two research questions prior to the oral interview and this rate is increased to 45% based on the post interview responses. These results indicated a need for covering calculus questions that support the iff methodology in calculus education of STEM majors for improving their conceptual understanding.