Strategies used in solving proportion problems among seventh-grade students

Abstract

In the 2023/2024 school year, 146 seventh-grade Hungarian students (aged 12-13) participated in our classroom experiment on solving proportion problems. At the beginning and the end of the teaching phase, both the experimental and the control groups solved a test. Regarding the answers of the students, in the pre- and post-test mostly consisting of word problems, we examined the success of solving the problems, as well as the solution strategies. For this, we used the strategies of proportional thinking that already exist in the literature of mathematical didactics. We intended to answer the following questions: To what extent and in which ways do the different types of problems and texts influence the solution strategies chosen by the students? How successfully do seventh-grade students solve proportion problems? Subject Classification: 97D50, 97F80