Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Prior research has shown that many elementary school students hold misconceptions about mathematical equivalence, interpreting the equal sign operationally as an indicator to give an answer or the total. They often fail to correctly solve missing operand problems such as 1+5= ___ + 2. The present study extends the research on mathematical equivalence to examine pre-service teachers' performance on equivalence tasks. Results show that some participants failed to correctly solve missing operand problems and chose an operational definition of the equal sign over the correct relational definition. Many participants failed to recognize statements that violate equality and failed to correctly identify equations and operations. These findings suggest that misconceptions of mathematical equivalence can involve confusion about the definition of equation and the meaning of mathematical operation.