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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Article
The Need to Know Algebra Skills, Misconceptions, Misapplications and Weaknesses of Students
Author(s)
Cristina Eccius-Wellmann
Full-Text PDF
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DOI:10.17265/1537-1514/2012.09.008
Affiliation(s)
Cristina Eccius-Wellmann, Dr., Ph.D., Business school, Universidad Panamericana.
ABSTRACT
cMisapplications, misconceptions, and weaknesses in algebra hinder students to understand other topics like finance, operations, microeconomics and other branches of business schools. To help students effectively to learn it is necessary to know what are the most worrying arithmetic and algebraic errors they show and which misconceptions they might underlie. A 42-item test was administrated to 270 freshmen who enter Universidad Panamericana, “Escuela de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales”, to investigate their arithmetic and algebraic skills, misconceptions, misapplications, and weaknesses, and it was found that a vast majority had a low performance. Marking an item as incorrect would not help students to overcome their difficulties. Five items, with the most worrying arithmetic and algebraic misunderstandings were analyzed via students’ processes to know the possible causes of the arithmetic and algebraic errors in order to apply effective strategies to remediating these difficulties. students’ procedures often show very clear about their thinking and their misconceptions. Several different misconceptions in one and the same item were found very often. Therefore, it is imperative to analyze every student’s answer to know which might be the reason of the error. Every misconception has to be treated in different ways. It was established, that students show basic arithmetic and algebraic errors, like order of operations, conjoin problems, improper simplification strategies, and other problems. Students who enter Universidad Panamericana came from many different high schools in the west and north-west of Mexico and the transmission of these results have the intention of highlighting the importance of detecting misconceptions when they appear in school mathematic lessons, in spite of having less mathematic problems in college.
KEYWORDS
systematic error, algebraic expressions, simplifying algebraic expressions, bracket expansion
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References
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