Differences in grade 7 students’ understanding of the equal sign

ABSTRACT

This paper studies grade 7 (age 13) students’ expressed understanding about the equal sign/notion of equivalence in order to investigate what aspects of the concept that could be seen as an established knowledge at lower secondary school/middle school. Using items from different instruments and combining these to a new one that covered a broad spectrum of procedural and conceptual knowledge, we collected data from 159 students. The different statistical tests showed that if focusing only on separate items, it could confirm that students could be seen either having operational or relational understanding of the equal sign. However, when taking all results into account using several analyses, students’ understanding appear to be much more complex. Instead of a dichotomized view, students’ expressed knowledge of mathematical equivalence should be seen as a continuum.

KEYWORDS:

• Conceptual understanding
• equal sign
• notion of equality
• procedural understanding

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lovisa Sumpter

Lovisa Sumpter is a professor in mathematics education at University of Oslo and reader at Stockholm Unviersity.

Anna Löwenhielm

Anna Löwenhielm is a PhD student in mathematics education at Stockholm Unviersity.