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Analysis Of Students’ Proportional Reasoning Strategies, Michele Carney, Ev Smith, Gwyneth Hughes, Jonathan Brendefur, Angela Crawford, Tatia Totorica
Analysis Of Students’ Proportional Reasoning Strategies, Michele Carney, Ev Smith, Gwyneth Hughes, Jonathan Brendefur, Angela Crawford, Tatia Totorica
Curriculum, Instruction, and Foundational Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations
Proportional reasoning is key to students’ acquisition and application of complex mathematics and science topics. Research is needed regarding how students’ progress towards and come to demonstrate key developmental understandings within proportional reasoning. To this end we created and administered assessment items to 297 middle grades students. We categorized student solution processes qualitatively, followed by Rasch analysis to examine item difficulty and strategy use in relation to an anticipated trajectory. Our findings indicate that different strategies manifest themselves in a hierarchical manner, providing initial confirmation of categories based on strategy efficiency and emphasizing the importance of teacher (and researcher) analysis …