REFLECTIONS on Practice: Relating Fractions & Decimals: Listening to Students Talk

Despite the great amount of time that middle-grades teachers devote to teaching fractions and decimals, converting between these two representations continues to be a difficult task for students. According to the results of the sixth National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) conducted in 19...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Mathematics teaching in the middle school 1999-02, Vol.4 (5), p.318-321
Main Authors: OPPENHEIMER, LAUREN, HUNTING, ROBERT P.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Decimals
Fractions
Mathematics curricula
Mathematics education
Mathematics teachers
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Summary:Despite the great amount of time that middle-grades teachers devote to teaching fractions and decimals, converting between these two representations continues to be a difficult task for students. According to the results of the sixth National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) conducted in 1992, although 90 percent of eighth-grade students correctly paired a simple fraction with its pictorial representation, only 63 percent of students successfully shaded a fractional portion of a given rectangular region using equivalent fractions. Likewise, 92 percent correctly identified 14.9 seconds as being the decimal representation closest to 15 seconds, but when comparing common fractions with decimal notation, only 51 percent of eighth-grade students chose 1/2 as being the fraction closest to 0.52. Twenty-nine percent of eighth graders chose the fraction 1/50 as being closest in value to 0.52 (Kouba, Zawojewski, and Struchens 1997).
ISSN:1072-0839
2328-5486
DOI:10.5951/MTMS.4.5.0318