6th Grade Students’ Solution Strategies on Proportional Reasoning Problems

Abstract

This research was conducted to investigate 6th grade students' problem solving strategies and whether these strategies change with problem type and number structure of problems. 165 randomly selected students of grade six participated in this study. A problem test which contains proportional and non-proportional word problems was designed as a data collecting tool. Number structures also considered in the problem test. Descriptive data analysis methods were used in this study. Analysis has shown that students used 7 different strategies on solving proportional problems and 6 different strategies on solving non-proportional problems.

Incoherencies in elementary pre-service teachers’ understanding of calculations in proportional tasks

“…According to Vergnaud (1983), the development of proportional reasoning is determined by both students' ability to recognize the correct relationship between quantities and the strategies they use to solve problems. Several studies (Artut & Pelen, 2015;Baxter & Junker, 2001;Son, 2013) identified three correct strategies in their study to investigate developmental levels of proportional reasoning associated with correct and incorrect strategies for proportion tasks, as follows:…”

“…In missing-value problems, students are usually asked to determine the missing-value when three of the four values are given. In comparison problems, students are asked to compare two ratios to determine whether they are equal (Artut & Pelen, 2015). In this study, we focused on a comparison problem (see the Car Gas Problem in Figure 1) to investigate PSTs' ability to interpret their own calculations in a proportional word problem.…”

Analysis the proportional reasoning abilities of senior high school students in solving mathematical problems

“…Beberapa penelitian menunjukkan bahwa kemampuan siswa dalam menggunakan penalaran proporsionalnya masih rendah. Siswa masih mengalami kesulitan dalam membedakan pernyataan masalah proporsional dan nonproporsional (Artut & Pelen, 2015). Şen & Güler (2017) mengatakan bahwa tingkat keterampilan penalaran proporsional siswa masih rendah sebelum diberikan pengajaran strategi pemecahan masalah.…”