Crotonic acid was produced by oxidation of crotonaldehyde over molybdophosphoric acid supported on activated carbon. The full 2(3) central composite design was performed and aimed at optimizing oxidation catalysts to maximize the yield of crotonic acid. Response surface methodology was applied to obtain a second-order polynomial model and to generate the optimum conditions, with a loading of molybdophosphoric acid of 0.25, mass ratio of catalyst to crotonaldehyde of 0.025 and mass ratio of vanadium pentoxide to molybdophosphoric acid of 0.08. The crotonic acid yield was 66.7% under these conditions. Three experiments were conducted using the same optimum conditions, and therefore, good agreement was observed between the experimental data and the predicted values obtained from the model, by comparison