• School Mathematics
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.275-296
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• 2012

This study investigated elementary school students' understanding of basic functional relationships. It analyzed the written responses from a total of 2087 students of second, fourth, and sixth graders using tests that examined their understanding of five types of functional relationships. The results of this study showed that students tended to be more successful as their grades went up with regard to all the problem types. There were statistically differences among the three grade levels. Even lower graders were quite successful in dealing with additive relation, direct proportion, and inverse proportion. However the items dealing with square relation and linear relation were difficult even to sixth graders. It was common that students were good at completing the table by looking for a pattern from the given numbers but that they had difficulties in anticipating the value of 'y' when the value of 'x' is given either as a big number or as a symbol. Given these results, this paper includes issues and implications on how to foster functional thinking ability at the elementary school.

• Journal of Elementary Mathematics Education in Korea
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.937-957
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• 2010

The purpose of this study is to discover the features of symbol sense. This study tries to sum up the meaning and elements of symbol sense and the measures to improve them through documents. Also based on this, it analyzes the learning conditions about symbol sense for 6th grade mathematically able students and suggests the method that activates symbol sense in the math of elementary schools. Considering various studies on symbol sense, symbol sense means the exact knowledge and essential understanding in a comprehensive way. Symbol sense is an intuition about symbols that grasps the meaning of symbols, understands the situation of question, and realizes the usefulness of symbols in resolving a process. Considering all other scholars' opinions, this study sums up 5 elements of the symbol sense. (The recognition of needs to introduce symbol, ability to read the meaning of symbols, choice of suitable symbols according to the context, pattern guess through visualization, recognize the role of symbols in other context) This study draws the following conclusions after applying the symbol questionnaires targeting 6th grade mathematically able students : First, although they are math talents, there are some differences in terms of the symbol sense level. Second, 5 elements of the symbol sense are not completely separated. They are rather closely related in terms of mainly the symbol understanding, thereby several elements are combined.