Search

Conceptual understanding of properties of operations is an important element of algebraic thinking in primary school. Mathematical processes should be focused rather than mathematical products starting from primary school. The purpose of this study was to examine the Year Five pupils' understanding of relationship between addition and subtraction. Researchers utilized quantitative approach to investigate Year Five pupils' conceptual understanding of addition and subtraction. Pencil and paper based assessment consisting of three items was employed to collect the data. The three items comprised direction of change and relationship between addition and subtraction items. The three items also consist of reasoning sections. This article reports the analysis of the responses of 720 Year Five pupils from a district of Malacca. The findings showed the majority of the sample were unable to perform well for the items testing relationship between addition and subtraction. They could not work with addition and subtraction properties. The majority of them were also unable to provide conceptual reasoning for their answer. Only about half of the sample were aware about the inverse relationship of addition and subtraction.

This study mainly focused on the relationship between number sense and algebraic thinking. Previous studies have provided evidence that number sense plays an important role in developing algebraic thinking. The role of symbol and pattern sense are yet to discover in relation to number sense and algebraic thinking. The purpose of this study was to identify the mediating effects of symbol sense and pattern sense in year five pupils' relationship between number sense and algebraic thinking. To do so, two mathematics tests were carried out among 720 year five pupils in the district of Malacca, Malaysia. The collected data were analysed using a partial least squares-structural equation modeling approach. The data collected were analysed using SPSS 22.0 and SmartPLS 3.0. Results demonstrated that symbol sense and pattern sense are good mediators between year five pupils' number sense and algebraic thinking. This result of this study supports the past studies related to the role of number sense, symbol and pattern sense in developing algebraic thinking. The presented study provides suggestions as intervention to increase students' making sense ability in numbers, symbols and patterns to develop algebraic thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the research on year five pupils' understanding of generalised arithmetic, which aimed to investigate the understanding of year five pupils' commutative property and the property of zero together with its correlation with their mathematical achievement. Data for the study were collected via paper and pencil assessment answers for two items. Findings showed moderate achievement for both of the tasks. The pupils' explanation illustrated their poor conceptual understanding of commutative property and the property of zero. However, this understanding is not correlated with their mathematical achievement in school. It shows that an outstanding student in school did not necessarily acquire conceptual understanding of commutative principle and the property of zero. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]