Grade 6 students' abilities to represent functional relationships

2017-01-01
İşler Baykal, Işıl
Stephens, Ana
Fonger, Nicole
Blanton, Maria
Gardiner, Angela
Knuth, Eric
This paper reports results from Grade 6 students' written work on a functional thinking assessment item. The results show that students who experienced an early algebra intervention during Grades 3-5 were more likely to successfully represent a function rule in words and variables than students who did not. Also, both comparison and intervention groups of students were found to be more successful representing a function rule in variables than in words. The results underscore the impact of early algebra on students' later success in algebra, specifically with functional thinking, and challenge the notion that variable as a varying quantity should not be introduced until secondary school.
10th Congress of the European-Society-for-Research-in-Mathematics-Education (CERME)

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Citation Formats
I. İşler Baykal, A. Stephens, N. Fonger, M. Blanton, A. Gardiner, and E. Knuth, “Grade 6 students’ abilities to represent functional relationships,” presented at the 10th Congress of the European-Society-for-Research-in-Mathematics-Education (CERME), Dublin, IRELAND, 2017, Accessed: 00, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/53243.