Electronic Journals For Business Calculus

Kimberly J. Presser, Shippensburg University

Business students are typically required to take calculus as a part of their college curriculum. A business calculus course that teaches calculus in the context of economics and business can be extremely beneficial for these students. Working with the business faculty is the first step in providing a relevant calculus experience for your business students. Secondly, it is beneficial for your students to develop a personal understanding of the importance of calculus. This paper will describe a journal writing experiment for business calculus that sought to address this second issue. Examples of journal topics and student responses will be given. The implementation of these journals electronically (in order to service a large number of students) will also be discussed. Lastly, some ideas of the classroom discussion that evolved from the journals will be discussed.

Last Spring, I taught 3 sections of Applied Calculus (our Calculus for Business majors) which amounts to 120 students. I was interested in having the students do some kind of writing to motivate their own personal understanding of the material; however, I was wary of collecting 120 papers a few times in the semester or carrying around crates of journals for that many students. I decided to try electronic submission of journals using the class web page and email. I found many benefits to this method. The students actually spelling and grammar checked their writing because Word or their email programs took care of it for them. This made the journals much easier to read. I could respond quickly to each journal because it simply meant a reply to their email submission. The students could link their email to charts or articles online that pertained to their journal. In the future, I would also require that the students keep a hard copy version. There were a few technical difficulties that could have been readily dealt with had the students kept hard copies. I had incorrectly assumed that the students would save their messages on their computers.

The journals themselves consisted of a brief question to be answered in a short (one-page or less) response. Sometimes, I included an example of my own to get them headed down the right path. The topics covered included: Getting-To-Know You, “Why do Business Majors need to take Calculus?”, Find and analyze your own real-world function and Mathematics in Current Events. I graded the journals essentially on effort and clarity. I wanted the students to feel free for example to write comments that I might not agree with. For example, a few students consulted friends and family who are successful in business that didn’t feel that calculus was necessary at all.

More interesting than the journals themselves were a few of the discussions that resulted. A few students came to me really struggling with finding a real-world function. At first I was dumbfounded because I see the world as a sea of functions. I soon realized that “function” was a scary word to these students and all of the application-oriented problems, tables and graphs had not helped to bridge that gap with the students. This lead to a class discussion on analyzing everything we come across from morning to night to see how functions were involved. This was the most enlightening way I have ever presented functions to my students.

All in all, I think that the journals were a really positive experience. There are a few changes I would make in the future. For example: give less detailed journal examples, because this thwarts some students’ individuality, collect hard copies of the journals at the end of the semester for future reference, and consult with business professors to find some more directed journal topics.