Analysis of Students’ Mistakes in Solving Integrals to Minimize their Mistakes

Abstract. Experiences of teaching Integral have indicated that the vast majorities of Iranian university students commit numerous errors while solving integral problems and have weak skills in this field; we might even say that they hide away from integral and consider it the nightmare of mathematics. On the other hand, Integral is the base of pure and applied mathematics for all students of science, especially engineering, which some of their lessons are dependent on it directly or indirectly, so it is important to pay attention to it. Through descriptive method-exposed factor, an exam has been conducted in the form of three questions, the first of which is consisted of 4 sections on fifty students from different fields, and then interviews were conducted with a few of those students about their answers in order to study the students’ behaviors when solving integral problems and to determine the type of their errors. By analyzing the performance of students in this test, we can see that students often struggle with integral and mostly have a feeble performance in solving trigonometric integrals. They want to learn computational integral instead of how to conceptualize integral in their minds correctly. The error most committed by university students was procedural errors, which arise from using derivative instead of integral. Besides most of the mistakes happen in solving definite integrals, and calculating finite areas between two curves. This is due to a lack of understanding of integrals and a lack of information in other areas of mathematics. Keywords.