A case for teaching about parameters in calculus courses
History and Overview
2025-10-02 v1
Abstract
Working with letters that represent unknown constants, i.e., parameters, has been historically challenging for students. This is an important skill for their success in many future quantitative settings, and yet it appears this topic is rarely included explicitly in math curricula. We argue that we should be explicitly teaching our students how to work with parameters, and that single variable calculus courses are a natural place to do so. We offer justification for this as well as examples and sample outlines for incorporating parameters into these classes.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2510.00223,
title = {A case for teaching about parameters in calculus courses},
author = {Juliana Belding and Keaton Quinn},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.00223},
year = {2025}
}