US Students Struggle With Understanding of the 'Equal' Sign

bickerd--- writes with news of research out of Texas A&M which found that roughly 70% of middle grades students in the US don't fully understand what the 'equal' sign means. Quoting: "'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. 'Students who have learned to memorize symbols and who have a limited understanding of the equal sign will tend to solve problems such as 4+3+2=( )+2 by adding the numbers on the left, and placing it in the parentheses, then add those terms and create another equal sign with the new answer,' he explains. 'So the work would look like 4+3+2=(9)+2=11.'"

Comments

Re:Wrong

[zill]

Lunch - Lunches

Makes you wonder why the American kids are considered overweight when the British ones are having multiple lunches a day.

Re:Wrong

[Nadaka]

You ever spent much time in the South? The average wal-mart in the US has 4 to 8 of those electric carts for the disabled. 970 in Picayune, MS has 40, and each one of them is in use by someone weighing 400 to 800 lbs to the point where sometimes a genuinely crippled person has to wait. I've never been to europe, but I can not possibly imagine a place where there are as many morbidly obese people than Mississippi.