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.
[...]
“The equal sign is pervasive and fundamentally linked to mathematics from kindergarten through upper-level calculus,” Robert M. Capraro says. “The idea of symbols that convey relative meaning, such as the equal sign and “less than” and “greater than” signs, is complex and they serve as a precursor to ideas of variables, which also require the same level of abstract thinking.”The problem is students memorize procedures without fully understanding the mathematics, he notes. [...] One cause of the problem might be the textbooks, the research shows.
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.”
All victims of an inferior public education system whose main purpose is to protect union workers (aka teachers).
When all the text books are picked by the idiots in Texas, I guess you get what you pay for.
WTF…
Someone in Texas needs to die!
#3 – Benjamin,
I agree that this is bad notation. However, find x may be no better for Americuns. You’d likely get an answer like this from a significant number of students.
#9 – Miss peach,
Exactly when did Texas decide *it* could criticize textbooks??
Somewhere around the same time that it decided it could determine the textbook content for 47 of the 50 states.
http://tinyurl.com/32y2dvk
@jbenson2 said, on August 16th, 2010 at 5:45 am
“Easy to understand why the “not-equal” sign is not understood in schools. That is because the ed-ucrats want everyone to be equal.”
I think you’re one of the kids we’re talking about. You got the entire thing backwards and didn’t understand the point. FUNNY!
It’s the EQUALS they’re not understanding. If it’s our evil ‘ed-ucrats’ having the nerve to teach that blacks, gays and Jews are all humans and equal to god fearing whites, if that’s the problem you see, then all the “equality” teaching should mean they DO understand equals (and therefore not equals). But this study is saying they DON’T get that one thing is equal to another.
We should just let Texas keep creating the text books, it’s working SO well. Forget science and rational thought, lets just replace it all by magic, superstition and fear of “them” (whoever they are this week). (sigh)
Actually, I would expect Texas to like the equal sign. Put a few together and it looks just like the barrels of a double barrel shotgun.
>===t====
See?
And no matter how you want to present the question, only people who don’t understand the concept of equality would return 4+3+2=(9)+2=11 as the answer. 4+3+2 is not equal to 11.
dusanmal is on the right track. Math instruction in the US was destroyed a while back when some morons at the National Council for Teachers of Mathematics decided that the methods used for a century were no longer any good. Further, they got the new approach embedded without any empirical studies or unbiased research. My son had a helluva time in college where they still teach math…new remedial courses exist for the poor victims of this nonsense.
Books? “there’s an app for that!”
actually there are a bunch of apps for that!
I watched my 2yr old grandkid match objects on ‘his’ iPhone, and he clearly understood = and …
So, I think ‘books’ are ‘obsolete’ now…
#28 Well, give me one or two solved examples and I could figure out the notation (or any math problem.)
In any case, nowhere is an unknown variable represented as a pair of parenthesis. Of course the answer is 7, but I would rather they used variables or at least blanks. It was confusingly laid out.
Obviously where it was taught, the teacher didn’t use solved examples, so the students had no way to figure out what to do. THe teacher needs to teach whatever notation is necessary for the students to understand how to solve the problems.
#31, you keep apologizing for the students’ inability to infer the meaning of the notion because you don’t agree with the notion. The whole point is that there is an equal sign with something on each side. What makes the left side equal to the right side? A student who understands that to be the meaning should not answer back some 4+3+2=(9)+2=11 nonsense. And that is the whole point of the study.
I blame the electronic calculator. The “=” sign is a logical expression, not an “execute” key for a compiled computational routine.
#33, that’s an interesting point.
I blame Dog. That and I’m a little sledyxic.
#35 – Monster’s Lawyer,
Slebus Oy!
#33 – Sargasso,
You probably nailed it … unfortunately. However, we must actually be able to do some basic math in our heads … I think. Or, perhaps we should just give up and let these guys win.
http://tinyurl.com/ye9h2vd
I like the study that shows x% of students think Alaska is an island because in so many maps it appears in a circle next to Hawaii in the middle of the ocean.
Context Rules when the subject is symbolic. Still, I have to go with Benji at #31. I can easily see confusion THE VERY FIRST TIME our kiddies are presented the = problem. But after a solution or two, the ambiguities are resolved.
So, “something” is not being fairly presented unless you think news report = the truth.
#18 Tyler McHenr said, “the reason that they wrote it as empty parentheses (more likely it was an empty rectangle on the actual question and the parentheses are just due to the limitations of ASCII”
That actually makes sense. Still should we be hiding the fact that kids are learning algebra so they don’t get too intimidated to do the problem?
#24 Misanthropic Scott said, “You’d likely get an answer like this from a significant number of students. http://tinyurl.com/cbup9n”
That is funny.
#32 Sea Lawyer said, “you keep apologizing for the students’ inability to infer the meaning of the notion because you don’t agree with the notion.”
Yes I hate the notation. However, #18 had the most probable explanation.
#37 bobbo said, “I like the study that shows x% of students think Alaska is an island because in so many maps it appears in a circle next to Hawaii in the middle of the ocean.”
Of course I had parents who showed me a larger map when had that same fallacy when I was 6. Also Hawaii isn’t in a square ocean within the borders of Mexico.
“Context Rules when the subject is symbolic. Still, I have to go with Benji at #31. I can easily see confusion THE VERY FIRST TIME our kiddies are presented the = problem. But after a solution or two, the ambiguities are resolved.”
Hopefully any sane teacher will teach the notation as they teach the subject.
What’s so hard to understand? Equal….this amount is the same as that amount. I don’t get the problem here.
This is the reason why Texan kids are stupid
http://glbtq.com/images/entries/slideshows/symbols_hrc_equality.gif