Abstract
This chapter presents findings from a teaching experiment on the initial understandings that primary Spanish students demonstrated when they were first introduced to the use of letters to stand for an indeterminate varying quantity in a functional relationship. We provide a detailed account of our task design and class activity to show how understanding of variable notation for functional relationships was cultivated. We discuss the degree to which results from previous studies generalize to the Spanish context. Our results, similar to those of previous studies, support the introduction of variables in elementary grades.
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Notes
- 1.
Names of students used in this chapter are pseudonyms.
- 2.
We remind the reader that five in Spanish is “cinco.”
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Acknowledgements
This study was developed within the Spanish projects of Research and Development with reference code EDU2013-41632-P and EDU2016-75771-P, financed by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness.
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Molina, M., Ambrose, R., del Rio, A. (2018). First Encounter with Variables by First and Third Grade Spanish Students. In: Kieran, C. (eds) Teaching and Learning Algebraic Thinking with 5- to 12-Year-Olds. ICME-13 Monographs. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68351-5_11
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