{"id":748,"date":"2011-12-21T23:04:33","date_gmt":"2011-12-21T23:04:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/SallyJordan\/?p=748"},"modified":"2011-12-21T23:06:12","modified_gmt":"2011-12-21T23:06:12","slug":"function-or-derivative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/SallyJordan\/?p=748","title":{"rendered":"Function or derivative?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The common\u00a0student error in the question below\u00a0is\u00a0somewhat predictable – but I’m not sure why the students make the error that they do.<\/p>\n

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Whilst 60.4% of responses are entirely correct, 21.7% select the three options that are actually the places where the function rather than its derivative is zero. In the existing version of the Maths for Science<\/em> End of Module Assignment, this question is assessing the contents of a chapter that some students choose not to study – so it is more than usually\u00a0 likely that a certain percentage of students are guessing, further encouraged by the fact that this is a multiple choice question.<\/p>\n

So I’m not sure we can draw many conclusions from the errors that students make on this occasion. But if students really think that dy\/dx is zero at the points where the graph crosses the horizontal axis, then they are mistaking the function and its gradient. This is a pretty basic mistake – perhaps a bit like mistaking x to the power of 3 with x times 3. That might be rather\u00a0interesting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The common\u00a0student error in the question below\u00a0is\u00a0somewhat predictable – but I’m not sure why the students make the error that they do. Whilst 60.4% of responses are entirely correct, 21.7% select the three options that are actually the places where … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[181,167,111],"tags":[387,384,369],"class_list":["post-748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-derivative","category-gradient","category-mathematical-misunderstandings","tag-derivative","tag-gradient","tag-mathematical-misunderstandings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/SallyJordan\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/SallyJordan\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/SallyJordan\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/SallyJordan\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/SallyJordan\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=748"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/SallyJordan\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":752,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/SallyJordan\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748\/revisions\/752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/SallyJordan\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/SallyJordan\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/SallyJordan\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}