Investigating the procedural and structural conception of algebraic expressions of seventh, eighth, ninth  grades students

Heidari, F.Z.; Asghary, N.

doi:10.22061/jte.2018.3384.1879

Document Type : Original Research Paper

Authors

Department of mathematics, central Tehran Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran

https://doi.org/10.22061/jte.2018.3384.1879

Abstract

Background and Objective:Many international studies have been done in order to trace the intellectual path of students in manipulation with the concept of variables and algebraic expressions, as well as to examine and specify their functional problems. However, despite the importance of these two concepts, comprehensive research has not been conducted in the seventh, eighth and ninth grades in Iran, and research has often focused on how to manipulate and write algebraic expressions. Due to the change in Iran's mathematics curriculum in 2009 and the consequent change in mathematics textbooks, the need for a clear picture of students' understanding of these two concepts is doubled.Algebraic expressions are the important part of Algebra and its deep understanding is necessory for solving algebraic problems. The purpose of this study was to investigate grade 7^th, 8^th and 9^th students' understanding of algebraic expressions.
Methods: 400 students were selected by multistage cluster sampling from 7^th , 8^th and 9^th grade students in Tehran. A researcher-made test was designed and implemented. Out of 400 students, 15 students were selected and semi-structured interviews were conducted in order to clarify and interpret students' perceptions.
Findings:The results of the test and interviews showed that most students have a poor structural understanding of algebraic expressions and they have understood them merely procedurally. Increasing academic bases did not almost improve structural understanding, but procedural understanding improves with increasing levels.
Conclusion:The results of this study showed that most students in algebraic expressions (simple and complex) have a purely procedural understanding, which means that they have understood algebraic expressions as a set of algorithms and processes. As it turned out from the interviews, these people, when it is necessary to perform an operation on the algebraic expression and consider the algebraic expression as a whole, only memorize the steps as a parrot because they have no understanding of the whole structure of the algebraic expression; and they focus only on the steps within an algebraic expression. In complex algebraic expressions, compared to simple algebraic expressions, the percentage of students who had a purely procedural understanding was reduced. The results of interviews with a number of students showed that this decrease was not due to an increase in students' structural understanding, but for reasons such as ignoring the distributive action, not understanding algebraic expressions, not understanding the process in complex algebraic expressions.

Keywords

20.1001.1.20080441.1398.13.3.15.0

Main Subjects

Mathematics Education

COPYRIGHTS
©2019 The author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, as long as the original authors and source are cited. No permission is required from the authors or the publishers.

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