Students’ common mistakes in basic differentiation topics Available to Purchase

Engineering students are usually required to take and at least pass the basic course in Calculus. Even though the course is basic, some of these students struggle to understand the subject, the topic of differentiation, which is said to be one of the most challenging topics to comprehend. It seems students have difficulty to demonstrate their ability to solve problems in differentiation properly and this has resulted in many of them to perform poorly in examinations. Such poor results will greatly affect the students’ study plans. Considering this, the purpose of this paper is to present an analysis of students’ errors and misconceptions in learning an undergraduate course, Calculus I. The study was conducted among a group of Electrical Engineering students in UiTM Johor Branch, Pasir Gudang Campus. Data were collected from 100 test scripts on the topic of differentiation. For this study, three questions were analyzed, focusing on product rules, quotient rules and chain rules. The analysis showed that students’ errors and misconceptions in differentiation were due to their lack of basic mathematical knowledge. In addition, it was found that, students often did not make full use of their previous learning but instead relied on memorization techniques to learn, a method that contradicts with the 21^st century learning approaches. It is hoped that the results of this study will highlight the common mistakes students make in learning differentiation, thus enabling instructors to plan their lessons and guide their students better.