Misconceptions in Maths - Essay Example

According to Swann (2001, p.147), “People makes mistakes for different reasons. Some may be simply due to lapses in concentration, hasty reasoning, memory overload or a failure to notice salient features of a situation. Others, however, may be symptoms of deeper misunderstandings or may not be mistakes at all – they may be result of alternative interpretations of the situations.” According to Sadi (2007, p.2), “More students have problems with decimals than with any other number concept.

Difficulties with decimal numbers range from comprehending place value after the decimal to proper use of the algorithm of addition and subtraction.” Some of the most common misconceptions that children makes in decimal are identifying which decimal number is greater, placing the decimal in order from smallest to largest, subtracting and adding. This is illustrated by below examples In this case, some children may think that 3.501 is greater than 3.52 because 3.52 have three terms as compared to 3.

501 that have four terms. They simply ignore the decimal when comparing two numbers. Children are taught that 35.90 is identical to 35.9. Now, some children may confuse with it and will be not able to determine exactly when zero be written and when it should be omitted. For example, dividing 1632 by 8 they will answer 24 instead of 204.In addition, children think that it gets bigger when they multiply and smaller when they divide. Therefore they seems to be inconceivable that 8 × 0.5 give 4, since 4 is smaller than 8.

Similarly, they find it hard to accept that 20 ÷ 0.2 gives 100, since 100 is much bigger than 20. For many children, to make a number bigger, they have to multiply it and to make it smaller they have to divide it (Sadi 2007, p.3). According to Sadi (2007, p.5), only 26% of twelve-year old students could work out how much a pair of jeans which normally costs £15 would cost after a 20% reduction and there ere thirty-three different answers were given to