Hewitt - The space between the unknown and a variable.pdf (194.87 kB)
The space between an unknown and a variable
conference contribution
posted on 2015-07-08, 13:37 authored by Dave HewittThe meaning given to letters is significant for students’ ability to be successful with
algebraic tasks. Recent studies have noted that even when students have a sense of
generalised number, they often have a natural number bias in the values they think a
letter can take. This study analyses interviews from 13 students across two schools to
explore the meaning they had for letters. The responses supported the idea that some
students have a natural number bias and also that the notion of a letter representing a
fraction is problematic. In addition, three other factors emerged which affected the
meaning given to a letter: what was mentally stressed; the desire to avoid “messy”
calculations; and viewing an equation as an example of a wider class of equations.
History
School
- Science
Department
- Mathematics Education Centre
Published in
38th Conference of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education and the 36th Conference of the North American Chapter of the Psychology of Mathematics Education Joint Meeting of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education (PME 38) and PME North America Chapter (PME-NA 36)Volume
3Pages
289 - 296 (8)Citation
HEWITT, D., 2014. The space between an unknown and a variable. IN: Oesterle, S., Liljedahl, P., Nicol, C., and Allan, D. (Eds.) Proceedings of the 38th Conference of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education and the 36th Conference of the North American Chapter of the Psychology of Mathematics Education (PME 38/ PME-NA 36) Vancouver, Canada, volume 3, pp. 289 - 296.Publisher
© the authors. Published by PMEVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2014Notes
This is a conference paper.ISBN
9780864913630Language
- en
Location
Vancouver, CanadaAdministrator link
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