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An Investigation Of Conceptual Knowledge: Urban African American Middle School Students' Use Of Fraction Representations And Fraction Computations In Performance-Based Tasks, Sandra Ann Canterbury

Middle-Secondary Education and Instructional Technology Dissertations

A relatively large number of 8th-grade public middle school students in the United States, particularly in urban communities, are not performing at acceptable levels in mathematics. One concept that poses significant difficulty for these students and negatively affects their overall mathematics achievement is fractions. Many researchers have attributed these difficulties primarily to traditional fraction instruction that emphasizes procedural rather than conceptual knowledge. Therefore this study was designed to investigate how students use their computational and conceptual knowledge and fraction representations to solve fraction-related performance-based mathematical tasks. Social constructivism was used as the theoretical framework in examining conceptual knowledge related to …