mohammad darvisahzadeh

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.