• Communications of Mathematical Education
• /
• v.22 no.4
• /
• pp.417-444
• /
• 2008

Many research papers on the college students' functional concept show they have poor understanding on this topic. To compare the results with that of Korean students, four interrelated topics are chosen: How do they understand the concept of function?; what are their misconceptions including epistemological obstacles?; How do the function concepts develop and are acquired? For this a survey has been conducted to 95 engineering students just before they start Calculus course. We have done research on other major areas including psychology, economics and statistics to see how function is defined in these areas. Function definitions from US math text books are also introduced. Based on the these and the survey, some suggestions are made on the new curriculum which treat function as a correspondence relation. Vertical line test should be added to the Algebra II/Pre calculus course to check the univalent property.