| EpiDEMES |
This article presents a review of our research on students’ understanding of the calculus of bivariatefunctions. It summarizes findings from studies conducted during 15 years of research on the topic with the aim ofdisseminating our overall results in an accessible format. The results discussed underscore the new challenges thatstudents face when dealing with this new type of function and suggest that the belief that students can easily generalizefrom their knowledge of one-variable functions is not sustained by research, so the different foundational notionsnecessary for the context of bivariate functions need to be considered explicitly during instruction. We include researchbased suggestions that have practical value for teaching these functions, and update the state of research in thisimportant area of the didactics of mathematics, which makes the need for further research apparent.