Didactic transposition of loan repayments in economics and the place of the discrete-continuous interplay.

The study reported in this paper is motivated by an article published on a financial portal that presented loan repayments with a continuous approach, as opposed to the discrete approach of addressing loan repayments applied in mathematics courses for economists. Using the Anthropological Theory of the Didactic, we analyse the current didactic transposition of this content, based on a textbook for mathematics in economics and five interviews with teachers of mathematics and of economics, inquiring about their practices in teaching related to loan repayments in economics. The interviewed teachers indicated that this content is presented in a discrete way in mathematics courses for economics, although for reasons that do not seem directly connected to the content itself. Additionally, although the participants see the interest of considering the use of continuous variables and graphs, several constraints prevent them from their use in the context of loan repayments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]