• Journal of Educational Research in Mathematics
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.103-121
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• 2008

The primary purpose of this study was to gather knowledge about $5^{th},\;6^{th},\;and\;7^{th}$ graders' proportional reasoning ability by investigating their reactions and use of strategies when encounting proportional or nonproportional problems, and then to raise issues concerning instructional methods related to proportion. A descriptive study through pencil-and-paper tests was conducted. The tests consisted of 12 questions, which included 8 proportional questions and 4 nonproportional questions. The following conclusions were drawn from the results obtained in this study. First, for a deeper understanding of the ratio, textbooks should treat numerical comparison problems and qualitative prediction and comparison problems together with missing-value problems. Second, when solving missing-value problems, students correctly answered direct-proportion questions but failed to correctly answer inverse-proportion questions. This result highlights the need for a more intensive curriculum to handle inverse-proportion. In particular, students need to experience inverse-relationships more often. Third, qualitative reasoning tends to be a more general norm than quantitative reasoning. Moreover, the former could be the cornerstone of proportional reasoning, and for this reason, qualitative reasoning should be emphasized before proportional reasoning. Forth, when dealing with nonproportional problems about 34% of students made proportional errors because they focused on numerical structure instead of comprehending the overall relationship. In order to overcome such errors, qualitative reasoning should be emphasized. Before solving proportional problems, students must be enriched by experiences that include dealing with direct and inverse proportion problems as well as nonproportional situational problems. This will result in the ability to accurately recognize a proportional situation.