Students' Understanding of the Equal Sign Not Equal, Professor Says

ScienceDaily ^ | Aug. 10, 2010 | ScienceDaily staff

[Freeport]

Taken very literally, not all students are created equal -- especially in their math learning skills, say Texas A&M University researchers who have found that not fully understanding the "equal sign" in a math problem could be a key to why U.S. students underperform their peers from other countries in math.

"About 70 percent of middle grades students in the United States exhibit misconceptions, but nearly none of the international students in Korea and China have a misunderstanding about the equal sign, and Turkish students exhibited far less incidence of the misconception than the U.S. students," note Robert M. Capraro and Mary Capraro of the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Culture at Texas A&M.

They have been trying to evaluate the success of math education through students' interpretation of the equal sign. They have published several articles on this topic, with the most recent one published in the February 2010 issue of the journal Psychological Reports.

Students who exhibit the correct understanding of the equal sign show the greatest achievement in mathematics and persist in fields that require mathematics proficiency like engineering, according to their research.

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The Texas A&M researchers examined textbooks in China and the United States and found "Chinese textbooks provided the best examples for students and that even the best U.S. textbooks, those sponsored by the National Science Foundation, were lacking relational examples about the equal sign."

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[Kozak]

What matters is how they FEEL about the equal sign, and how it affects their self esteem....

[LA Woman3]

Wow! Insert Aggie joke! LOL! Math is still taught the old fashioned way at Midway!