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Document Analysis: The Intended CCSSM Elementary- and Middle-School Algebra Sequence

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Using Design Research and History to Tackle a Fundamental Problem with School Algebra

Abstract

Having identified the main problem (“Why do so many school students find it difficult to learn school algebra well?”), and having made decisions on historical and theoretical frameworks for the study it was important that the intended algebra content, as summarized by the common-core mathematics sequence and by the algebra content in textbooks which had previously been used by participating students, and in the textbooks being used in the seventh grade by the students, be identified and analyzed. The ensuing document analyses, presented in this chapter, revealed that the seventh-grade students might have been expected to know the associative and distributive properties for rational numbers and, given tables of values, they might have been expected to be able to identify and summarize, mathematically, the rules for uncomplicated linear sequences.

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Kanbir, S., Clements, M.A.(., Ellerton, N.F. (2018). Document Analysis: The Intended CCSSM Elementary- and Middle-School Algebra Sequence. In: Using Design Research and History to Tackle a Fundamental Problem with School Algebra. History of Mathematics Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59204-6_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59204-6_4

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-59203-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-59204-6

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