Characterizing The Difficulty In Fraction Operation
Volume 3 - Issue 6, June 2019 Edition
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Author(s)
Ray Ferdinand M. Gagani, Felix M. Diano Jr
Keywords
conceptual knowledge, difficulty levels; operations on fraction; procedural knowledge
Abstract
Learning fractions are one of the mathematics fundamentals that students must possess; however, many students impartially understand in applying its procedural mechanism and the essential concepts needed to implement it in making sense to quantifiable ideas entirely. This descriptive study is a blend of exploratory and comparative procedures that investigated the forty-seven 8th-grade public night high school students’ possible difficulty levels in operating fractions as the function of their procedural and conceptual understanding applied to addition, multiplication and division. Students’ scores are subjected to hierarchical cluster analysis and revealed three (1,2,3) clustering. Performance indexes on procedural expertise and conceptual facility generated the three thinking levels (0, 1, and 2) of hypothesized difficulties. The procedural and conceptual indexes levels impacted the performances in each cluster; the higher the indexes are, the higher the performances. The procedural and conceptual thinking levels were further hypothesized to have other levels of difficulty that characterizes misconception.
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