| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立彰化師範大學 === 科學教育研究所 === 95 === The objective of this study is to investigate secondary students’ conceptual development of the letter symbols, as well as to investigate the students’ types of errors and misconception.The objects of this study were the secondary students of one public junior high school in Taichung City, two classes were selected from each grade (where students were normally allotted) with 227 students in total. We adopted Collis’s theory of children’s interpretation of the letters which divided the conception of the letter symbols into six phases. The tests were designed based on Collis’s theory. The analysis was made to get a better understanding on the phases of the developments and changes of students’ conception of the letter symbols and to sum up students’ error types. Furthermore, some students were interviewed, for the purpose of further understanding on students’ way of thinking and reasons to figure out their misconception. The findings of this research are shown below:
1. There was a significant difference in secondary students’ conception about the phase of “letter evaluated”, “letter not used”, “letter used as an object”, “letter used as a specific unknown”, and “letter used as a generalized number”.
2. The learning on the phase of “letter used as a variable” is difficult for most secondary students.
3. The conception of the letter computation is developing in accordance with the grade advancement, the time of practice, the amount of the related courses taken and the better understanding on the concept of the letter symbol.
4. Due to the limitation of students’ reading comprehension, they are not able to transform the language information into computable letters. Thus students usually solve problem by their intuition or guessing that turns out in missing or neglecting the data given in the problem.
5. Based on the results of the study, it is proposed that the length of teaching period needs to be increased and more efficient learning strategies need to be introduced when the conception of the letter symbols are taught.
Some teaching suggestions, in the hope to be used by teachers in their teaching and preparing the teaching materials.
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