Meaning of derivative in the book tasks of 1st of “Bachillerato”

Abstract

Due to the importance of textbooks within the processes of teaching and learning in Mathematics, this article focuses on the tasks proposed in five textbooks of 1st of Bachillerato for this topic. The goal is to identify meanings of derivative in the textbooks through the proposed tasks. It is a quantitative research in which, by means of a cluster analysis, the tasks were grouped according to similarity. The results show that the books emphasize three meanings of the derivative: one procedural-algebraic, one algorithmic, and finally another conceptual-geometric meaning, all of them dominated by the symbolic representation system and that exclusively show a mathematical context.

Keywords:
Tasks analysis; Textbooks; Mathematics; Cluster analysis; Meaning of school mathematics content