Evaluation of Mathematical Building Blocks Impacting STEM Majors’ Ability to Solve Conceptual Power Series Questions

Success at university-level calculus and more advanced concepts require extensive time and effort due to the building blocks of the associated sub-concepts.Critical thinking is an essential part of demonstrating calculus knowledge in STEM fields to make a connection between the theory and practice.Establishing such a connection requires training learner's mind over time to develop a well-established theoretical background.In this work, Conceptual Learning Distribution (CLD) is introduced for the first time that can be used as a pedagogical methodology to determine a distribution for students' conceptual progressive understanding and it can also be used by instructors to measure K20 students' accumulating mathematics knowledge during the conceptual knowledge progression over time.CLD is applied to measure 18 STEM students' calculus subconceptual knowledge that relate to power series expansion of functions.These results attained for CLD will be compared with the results attained by the application of Action-Process-Object-Schema (APOS) theory.