Students’ Understanding of the Derivative - Literature Review of English and Korean Publications -

With a gradual increase in research on teaching and learning calculus, there have been various studies about students' thinking about the derivative. This paper reviews the results of the existing empirical studies published in Korean and English. These studies mainly have shown that how students think about the derivative is related to their understanding of the related concepts and the representations of the derivative. There are also recent studies that emphasize the importance of how students learn the derivative including different applications of the derivative in different disciplines. However, the current literature rarely addressed how students think about the derivative in terms of the language differences, e.g., in Korean and English. The different terms for the derivative at a point and the derivative of a function, which shows the relation between concepts, may be closely related to students' thinking of the derivative as a function. Future study on this topic may expand our understanding on the role language-specific terms play in students' learning of mathematical concepts.