Abstract:

Studies reveal that students as well as teachers have difficulties in understanding and learning of decimals. The purpose of this study is to investigate students’ as well as pre-service teachers’ solution strategies when solving a question that involves an estimation task for the value of a decimal number on the number line. We also examined the pre-service teachers’ anticipation of students’ misconceptions and difficulties for the given task. To conduct our analysis, we conducted interviews with three 5th and three 6th grade students, and eight pre-service teachers. During the interviews we asked them to solve the question and explain their solution strategies. The findings of the study indicate that students and pre-service approach this problem in different ways. However, both groups have a tendency to think of decimals successively and indicate precise answers rather than specifying a range of possible values. We also observed the pre-service teachers could only partially anticipate the misconceptions and difficulties faced by the students.

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