Abstract
This paper looks at recent research dealing with uses of the equal sign and underlying notions of equivalence or non-equivalence among preschoolers (their intuitive nitions of equality), elementary and secondary school children, and college students. The idea that the equal sign is a “do something signal”Footnote 1 (an operator symbol) persists throughout elementary school and even into junior high school. High schoolers' use of the equal sign in algebraic equations as a symbol for equivalence may be concealing a fairly tenuous grasp of the underlying relationship between the equal sign and the notion of equivalence, as indicated by some of the “shortcut” errors they make when solving equations.
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Notes
This expression was first coined by Behr, Erlwanger and Nichols in their 1976 PMDC Technical Report (S. Erlwanger, personal communication, June 1980).
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Kieran, C. Concepts associated with the equality symbol. Educ Stud Math 12, 317–326 (1981). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00311062
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00311062