Thesis (Ph.D.)--Syracuse University, 2008. / "Publication number: AAT 3333570."

The use of technology has become increasingly popular in mathematics education. Instructors have implemented technology into classroom lessons, as well as various applications outside of the classroom. This thesis outlines technology developed for use in a first-year calculus classroom and investigates the relationship between the use of weekly formative online Maple T.A. quizzes and student performance on the final exam. The data analysis of the online quizzes focuses on two years of a five-year study. Linear regression techniques are employed to investigate the relationship between final exam grades and both how a student interacts with and performs on the online quizzes. A set of interactive class notes and a library of computer demonstrations designed to be used in and out of a calculus classroom are presented. The demonstrations are coded in Maple and designed to give geometric understanding to challenging calculus concepts.

Certainly one of the most powerful and important modeling languages of our time is the Calculus. But research consistently shows that students do not understand how the variables in calculus-based mathematical models relate to aspects of the systems that those models are supposed to represent. Because of this, students never access the true power of calculus: its suitability to model a wide variety of real-world systems across domains. In this paper, we describe the motivation and theoretical foundations for the DeltaTick and HotLink Replay applications, an effort to address these difficulties by a) enabling students to model a wide variety of systems in the world that change over time by defining the behaviors of that system, and b) making explicit how a system\'s behavior relates to the mathematical trends that behavior creates. These applications employ the visualization and codification of behavior rules within the NetLogo agent-based modeling environment (Wilensky, 1999), rather than mathematical symbols, as their primary building blocks. As such, they provide an alternative to traditional mathematical techniques for exploring and solving advanced modeling problems, as well as exploring the major underlying concepts of calculus.

Certainly one of the most powerful and important modeling languages of our time is the Calculus. But research consistently shows that students do not understand how the variables in calculus-based mathematical models relate to aspects of the systems that those models are supposed to represent. Because of this, students never access the true power of calculus: its suitability to model a wide variety of real-world systems across domains. In this paper, we describe the motivation and theoretical foundations for the DeltaTick and HotLink Replay applications, an effort to address these difficulties by a) enabling students to model a wide variety of systems in the world that change over time by defining the behaviors of that system, and b) making explicit how a system\''s behavior relates to the mathematical trends that behavior creates. These applications employ the visualization and codification of behavior rules within the NetLogo agent-based modeling environment (Wilensky, 1999), rather than mathematical symbols, as their primary building blocks. As such, they provide an alternative to traditional mathematical techniques for exploring and solving advanced modeling problems, as well as exploring the major underlying concepts of calculus.