Preservice Elementary Teachers’ Misconceptions of Decimals.

Abstract

The purposes of this study were to (1) investigate preservice elementary teachers’ interpretations and misconceptions of decimal notation with familiar and unfamiliar decimals ; (2) describe the processes preservice elementary teachers used in solving decimal word problems involving multiplication and division ; and (3) analyze how the preservice elementary teachers’ interpretations and performances were affected by the misconceptions of decimal numbers. The subjects were 65 preservice elementary teachers enrolled in a methods course at the University of Georgia. The instrument was a 45 written test with 26 items of a “concepts” part and 19 items of a “word problems” part. Nineteen preservice teachers were interviewed according to their written test scores. The data was analyzed through SPSSX (Statistical Packages for Social Sciences) for the reliability of the test items and SAS (Statistics Analysis System) for percentage, means, standard deviation, Chi-square, and Pearson Correlation. The results showed that there were a positive relationship and a significant correlation between the concept scores and the problem solving scores at .01 level of significance. In the “concepts” part, writing decimal numbers for the indicated point and for the shaded areas were easier for preservice teachers to work with than plotting points on the number lines and shading the areas of the squares for the given decimals. Preservice elementary teachers’ most commonly misconcept was ignoring a zero value in the tenths place of a decimal number. In the “word problems” part, one step word problems were easier than two step word problems. The money context was the easiest context comparing with the time context and the measurement context. The decimals greater than one were easier than the decimals less than one.