Students' Intuitive Meanings for Infinite Series Convergence and Corresponding Implications

This paper describes our work to determine the naturalistic images that first-time second-semester university calculus students possess for series convergence. We found that the students we interviewed most frequently determined whether a series converged by imagining a process of appending summands into a running total and examining whether this running total appeared to approach an asymptotic value. We provide examples and three corresponding implications of this "asymptotic running total" that informed students' actions while determining series convergence or the value of convergence. Our paper adds to the research literature by confirming students' meanings for limits reported for other topics (e.g., limit of sequence, function, Taylor series) apply to infinite series and proposing relationships between previously reported meanings for series convergence. [For the complete proceedings, see ED630210.]