GIRLS JOURNEY TOWARDS PROPORTIONAL REASONING

• Main Author: Olof Bjorg Steinthorsdottir
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Iceland
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.497.2423; http://emis.dsd.sztaki.hu/proceedings/PME29/PME29RRPapers/PME29Vol4Steinthorsdottir.pdf

This study focused on 26 girls ’ development of proportional reasoning in two fifth-grade classrooms in Iceland. The students were used to instructional practices that encouraged them to devise their own solutions to mathematical problems. The results supported four levels of proportional reasoning. Level 1, girls showed limited ratio knowledge. Level 2, they perceived the given ratio as an indivisible unit. Level 3, students conceived of the given ratio as a reducible unit. And at Level 4 students no longer thought of ratios exclusively as unit quantities, but understood the proportion in terms of multiplicative relations. The results suggest that students can reach level 3 reasoning with less struggle than it takes to achieve level 4, which suggests that the knowledge needed to operate on level 3 was within their reach. OBJECTIVES This study investigates the developmental of proportional reasoning of girls in two fifth-grade classes in Iceland. The purposes of this study was to further investigate four levels of proportional reasoning identified in a pilot study that the author conducted in collaboration prior to the study reported here (Carpenter et al. 1999). In