Lexical Ambiguity in Statistics: What do Students Know about the Words Association, Average, Confidence, Random and Spread?

An Investigation into Some Lexical Ambiguities in Algebra: South African Experience

“…Barwell (2005). argue that some of the difficulties students experienced that led to poor performance are related to reading comprehension, syntactic variables the presence of "cue" words or the size of numbers involved However, recent studies have challenged this notion Kaplan et al (2009) suggest that with certain simple kind of algebra word problem, high school students and college students "were better" at solving simple story problems than the analogous equations.…”

“…At times , students are completely oblivious of any meaning that was intended for the symbols while at other times they, may know that meaning exists, but inadequate understanding will prevent them from assigning meaning to the symbols, or they may give erroneous meaning to the symbols (Howie, 2004). For example, as students study topics such as functions and graphs, they begin to understand and interpret one set of algebraic objects in terms of another (e.g., a function equation with its graph, a data set by its equation, a data set by its graph, Kaplan et al (2009) find that students are generally able to plot points and equations; however, in spite of this procedural fluency, students lack the ability to extract meaning from graphical representations whereas both the procedural and graphical representation must go hand in hand.…”

“…Algebra is one of the oldest aspect of mathematics and a major focus of mathematics curriculum; studies have indicated that success in algebra is important in careers outside of academia. Kaplan et al (2009) state that algebra often serves as a gate keeper to success in high school, post-secondary education, and many career paths. However, its learning has remained a significant challenge to students all over the world; there are three fundamental understanding in learning algebra which can serve as impediment to mastering it by many students, the abstract reasoning, the language and the structure.…”

“…Some of the findings are not within the scope of this study. This study is on the impact of language difficulty in algebra on students' academic performance; some studies have also looked into other factors related to mathematics achievement in its general sense ranging from motivation, personality characteristics gender, race and home-language (Kaplan et al 2009, Kara, 2009, and Howie 2004.…”

The GAISE College Report: The American Statistical Association Meets Sound Pedagogy in Central Virginia

“…Sisto discusses the increased challenge of both verbal and written expression of statistical ideas in the context of a group project in a multicultural classroom attempting to meet GAISE recommendations. All of these activities mention the well-documented difficulties of vocabulary in statistics instruction (see Kaplan, Fisher, & Rogness, 2009 for an overview of that literature).…”