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• Strategies used in solving proportion problems among seventh-grade students

  101-127

  Gábor Torma

  József Kosztolányi

  Views:

  16

  In the 2023/2024 school year, 146 seventh-grade Hungarian students (aged 12-13) participated in our classroom experiment on solving proportion problems. At the beginning and the end of the teaching phase, both the experimental and the control groups solved a test. Regarding the answers of the students, in the pre- and post-test mostly consisting of word problems, we examined the success of solving the problems, as well as the solution strategies. For this, we used the strategies of proportional thinking that already exist in the literature of mathematical didactics. We intended to answer the following questions: To what extent and in which ways do the different types of problems and texts influence the solution strategies chosen by the students? How successfully do seventh-grade students solve proportion problems?

  Subject Classification: 97D50, 97F80

• Word problems in different textbooks at the early stage of teaching mathematics comparative analysis

  31-49

  Judit Szitányi

  Fanni Biró

  Csaba Csíkos

  Views:

  259

  In a previous research, Csíkos and Szitányi (2019) studied teachers’ views and pedagogical content knowledge on the teaching of mathematical word problems. While doing so, they reviewed and compared Eastern European textbooks of Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Croatia, and Hungary to see how world problem-solving strategies are presented in commonly used textbooks. Their results suggested that teachers, in general, agreed with the approach of the textbooks regarding the explicit solution strategies and the types of word problems used for teaching problem-solving. They also revealed that the majority of the participants agreed that a word problem-solving algorithm should be introduced to the students as early as in the first school year. These results have been presented at the Varga 100 Conference in November 2019. As the findings suggested a remarkable similarity between the Eastern European textbook approaches, in the current study we decided to conduct further research involving more textbooks from China, Finland, and the United States.

  Subject Classification: 97U20, 08A50

• Conversion between different symbolic representations of rational numbers among 9th-grade students

  29-45

  Gábor Torma

  József Kosztolányi

  Views:

  185

  Our research involved nearly 800 ninth-grade secondary school students (aged 14-15) during the first weeks of the 2023/2024 school year. Less than 40% of students solved the text problems related to common fractions and percentages correctly. In terms of student solutions, pupils showed a higher success rate when the text of the problem contained common fractions, and the solution had to be given as a percentage. In this case, the success rate of switching between different symbolic representations of rational numbers (common fraction, percentage) was also higher. Observation of the methods used to solve also suggests that the majority of students are not flexible enough when it comes to switching between different representations.

  Subject Classification: 97F80, 97D70

• Why do we complicate the solution of the problem? reflection of Finnish students and teachers on a mathematical summer camp

  405-415

  András Ambrus

  István Hortobágyi

  Marjatta Näätänen

  Riitta Liira

  Maija Salmela

  Views:

  147

  This paper deals with reactions and reflections of Finnish secondary school students and teachers on Hungarian mathematics teaching culture. The experiences were collected at a mathematics summer camp in Hungary.