Interviews Reveal Year 8 Student's Struggle to Generalise Solutions to reverse Fraction Tasks

Abstract

The links between fractional knowledge and readiness for algebra have been highlighted by many researchers such as Wu (2001); Jacobs, Franke, Carpenter, Levi, and Battey, (2007); Empson, Levi, and Carpenter, (2011) and Siegler and colleagues (2012). This paper focuses on the final stage of an Australian research study that investigated the links between fractional competence and algebraic thinking. For our research, algebraic thinking is defined in terms of students’ capacity to identify an equivalence relationship between a given collection of objects and the fraction this collection represents of an unknown whole, and then to operate multiplicatively on both to find the whole. The key rese..