Year Five Pupils’ Understanding of Relationship Between Addition and Subtraction

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.