FINANCIAL MATHEMATICS AND COLLEGE STUDENTS’ CONCEPTIONS OF INVESTMENT

Abstract

The analysis of the conceptions that students hold about teaching and learning objects in finance can contribute to the effectiveness of financial education in financial mathematics. This article presents an analysis of the conceptions of university students about one of the elementary objects of financial mathematics in university education: the notion of investment. Through qualitative and quantitative analysis of the textual registers of 18 Industrial Engineering students from a Brazilian federal university, the paper discussed the investment concepts in terms of: (a) the financial or non-financial nature of the conception; (b) time as an imperative component of the definition of investment; (c) the presence of examples and (d) quantifying components in the registers. Differences were found in the responses of students who attended and students who did not attend a discipline related to financial mathematics, but such differences do not appear to be statistically significant.