Application of the APOS-ACE Theory to improve Students’ Graphical Understanding of Derivative

APOS-ACE (Action, Process, Object, and Schema-Activities, Classroom discussion, and Exercises) is applied in this article to explore the teaching and learning of derivative by giving emphasis on its graphical understanding. For this purpose, a Genetic Decomposition is developed based on the outcomes of previous studies and on our personal teaching experiences. An ACE cycle is designed with the help of the Maple software and implemented on a group of freshmen Iranian students (experimental group). The outcomes of this implementation are evaluated by comparing the performance of the experimental group to the performance of another equivalent student group (control group), to which the same subject was taught in the traditional, lecture-based way. Our findings demonstrated students’ who were in the experimental group shown a better understanding of the derivate compared to the control group. Therefore, such ACE cycle with Maple could be used more frequently for teaching calculus, especially derivative.