A Study on Sixth Grade Students' Misconceptions and Errors in Spatial Measurement: Length, Area, and Volume

Date

2016-10-01

Author

TAN ŞİŞMAN, GÜLÇİN
Aksu, Meral

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

307
views

0
downloads

The purpose of the present study was to portray students' misconceptions and errors while solving conceptually and procedurally oriented tasks involving length, area, and volume measurement. The data were collected from 445 sixth grade students attending public primary schools in Ankara, Turkiye via a test composed of 16 constructed-response format tasks. The findings revealed a wide range of misconceptions and errors such as "believing that all rulers are 30 cm long," "confusing area formula with perimeter formula," "believing a box has more than one surface area," "using the volume formula for surface area," "believing that ruler must be longer than the object measured," etc. These misconceptions and errors could be considered as the evidences indicating the sixth graders' lack of comprehension of the fundamental concepts of spatial measurement and their relationships and the procedures and formulas used for measuring length, area, and volume. The possible causes of such misconceptions and overcoming ways were also discussed.

Subject Keywords

Volume measurement, Spatial measurement, Procedural knowledge, Mathematical misconceptions, Length, Errors, Conceptual knowledge, Area

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/31881

Journal

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SCIENCE AND MATHEMATICS EDUCATION

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10763-015-9642-5

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Article

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

A Study on Investigating 8th Grade Students' Reasoning Skills on Measurement: The Case of Cylinder Işıksal Bostan, Mine; Osmanoglu, Aslihan (2010-04-01) The purpose of this study was to investigate 8th grade students' reasoning skills on measurement. Specifically, this study aimed to find students' reasoning skills on the case of surface area and volume of a cylinder. The data were collected from 271 8th grade elementary school students enrolled in three public and two private schools in Ankara at the end of 2008 spring semester. In order to investigate the elementary students' reasoning skills regarding the area and volume of a cylinder, the Cylinder Explo...
Sixth Grade Students' Performance on Length, Area, and Volume Measurement Sisman, Gulcin Tan; Aksu, Meral (2012-10-01) The purpose of this study was to investigate sixth grade students' conceptual and procedural knowledge and word problem solving skills in the domain of length, area, and volume measurement. Through Conceptual Knowledge, Procedural Knowledge, and Word-Problem Tests, data was collected from 445 sixth-grade students attending public primary schools in Ankara, Turkey. The findings revealed that the students were more successful in computational tasks than tasks requiring acquisition and coordination of underpin...
A Study on Investigating Eight Grade Students' Reasoning Skills on Measurement: The Case of Cylinder Işıksal Bostan, Mine; Osmanoğlu, Aslıhan (2010-01-01) The purpose of this study was to investigate 81 grade students' reasoning skills on measurement. Specifically, in case of surface area and volume of a cylinder. The data were collected from 271 eight grade elementary school students enrolled in three public and two private schools in Ankara at the end of 2008 spring semester. In order to investigate the elementary students' reasoning skills regarding the area and volume of a cylinder, the Cylinder Exploration Task (CET, Merseth, 2003) was administered as th...
A Case Study on Mathematical Classroom Discourse in a Fifth Grade Classroom Şahin Doğruer, Şule; Işıksal Bostan, Mine; Koç, Yusuf (2015-01-01) The purpose of this study was to analyze and interpret characteristics of classroom discourse of an elementary mathematics classroom. To examine the classroom discourse, a fifth grade mathematics classroom was observed during sixteen weeks, and twenty lesson hours in total. The analysis was based on Student Learning as the main category, which was further divided into two sub-categories, including content and learning. Results showed that despite the recent reform efforts in school mathematics in Turkey; st...
A case study on the aspects of classroom discourse in a fifth grade mathematics class in a regional elementary boarding school Şahin, Şule; Işıksal Bostan, Mine; Department of Elementary Science and Mathematics Education (2009) The purpose of this study was to analyze and interpret specific aspects and characteristics of classroom discourse of an elementary mathematics classroom. To examine the classroom discourse, a fifth grade mathematics classroom was observed during sixteen weeks, and twenty lessons in total. The analysis was based on two main categories: (1) Student Learning and (2) Teacher Moves. Student Learning further divided into two sub-categories as content and learning. Additionally, Teacher Moves also divided into co...

Citation Formats

G. TAN ŞİŞMAN and M. Aksu, “A Study on Sixth Grade Students’ Misconceptions and Errors in Spatial Measurement: Length, Area, and Volume,” INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SCIENCE AND MATHEMATICS EDUCATION, pp. 1293–1319, 2016, Accessed: 00, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/31881.