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How Well Do High-Achieving Undergraduate Students Understand School Algebra?

The aim of this research is to investigate how well high-achieving students entering tertiary-level education in Ireland understand school algebra. As part of a larger project, a 31-item test was developed to assess first-year undergraduate students’ understanding of basic algebraic concepts. The te...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Hyland, Diarmaid, O’Shea, Ann
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer International Publishing 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9922173/
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s42330-022-00256-9
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author Hyland, Diarmaid
O’Shea, Ann
author_facet Hyland, Diarmaid
O’Shea, Ann
author_sort Hyland, Diarmaid
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description The aim of this research is to investigate how well high-achieving students entering tertiary-level education in Ireland understand school algebra. As part of a larger project, a 31-item test was developed to assess first-year undergraduate students’ understanding of basic algebraic concepts. The test was administered online to students studying at least one mathematics module at tertiary level and received 327 responses. In this article, we study how the subset of high-achieving undergraduates in our sample performed on the test. The results demonstrated a very high level of understanding among students, as befits their level of study and prior achievement relative to the difficulty of the test. However, one subsection of the test stood out as being disproportionately difficult for these students. The section focused on valid solutions of equations and inequalities. The items in question are described in detail in this article as is the associated data. Our analysis shows that this topic is an area of concern even for high-achieving undergraduates and so deserves further attention. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of this research and details of the larger project.
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spelling pubmed-99221732023-02-13 How Well Do High-Achieving Undergraduate Students Understand School Algebra? Hyland, Diarmaid O’Shea, Ann Can. J. Sci. Math. Techn. Educ. Article The aim of this research is to investigate how well high-achieving students entering tertiary-level education in Ireland understand school algebra. As part of a larger project, a 31-item test was developed to assess first-year undergraduate students’ understanding of basic algebraic concepts. The test was administered online to students studying at least one mathematics module at tertiary level and received 327 responses. In this article, we study how the subset of high-achieving undergraduates in our sample performed on the test. The results demonstrated a very high level of understanding among students, as befits their level of study and prior achievement relative to the difficulty of the test. However, one subsection of the test stood out as being disproportionately difficult for these students. The section focused on valid solutions of equations and inequalities. The items in question are described in detail in this article as is the associated data. Our analysis shows that this topic is an area of concern even for high-achieving undergraduates and so deserves further attention. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of this research and details of the larger project. Springer International Publishing 2023-02-11 2022 /pmc/articles/PMC9922173/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s42330-022-00256-9 Text en © The Author(s) 2023 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) .
spellingShingle Article
Hyland, Diarmaid
O’Shea, Ann
How Well Do High-Achieving Undergraduate Students Understand School Algebra?
title How Well Do High-Achieving Undergraduate Students Understand School Algebra?
title_full How Well Do High-Achieving Undergraduate Students Understand School Algebra?
title_fullStr How Well Do High-Achieving Undergraduate Students Understand School Algebra?
title_full_unstemmed How Well Do High-Achieving Undergraduate Students Understand School Algebra?
title_short How Well Do High-Achieving Undergraduate Students Understand School Algebra?
title_sort how well do high-achieving undergraduate students understand school algebra?
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9922173/
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s42330-022-00256-9
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