Students’ Conceptions of Equality
Megan Anakin, Chris Linsell & Jeffrey SmithDon’t we know enough about students’ conceptions of equality already? In this round table discussion, we will present preliminary findings from three lines of inquiry that suggests that students’ conceptions of equality are more complicated than previous theoretical frameworks indicate. This research stems from recent studies in New Zealand that suggest primary and intermediate students have difficulty solving missing number problems that involve the concept of equality. Rather than viewing students’ erroneous responses as problematic, we are probing into how students express their conceptions of equality. We are using diverse methods to analyse students’ written, verbal, and non-verbal responses to arithmetic missing number problems collected from different assessment contexts. Two lines of inquiry involve extant data analysis from samples of over 400 Year 4 (8 and 9 year old) and Year 8 (12 and 13 year old) students that participated in the National Educational Monitoring Project in 2009. In these inquiries, one involves quantitative analyses of student’s written responses and the other involves quantitative and qualitative analyses of students’ oral responses that were video recorded in one-on-one interviews with an adult assessor. The third line of inquiry is a prospective classroom-based study that involves microanalysis of video recorded interactions between pairs of Year 6 (10 and 11 year old) students as they work together to solve a series of missing number problems. Because we are proposing a more complicated theoretical framework of students’ conceptions of equality, we seek feedback, as well as critique, about the strengths and limitations of our diverse methods of inquiry.