Misconceptions of primary school students ( 4th ? 8th grades ) in learning of algebra

The purpose of this research is to determine the misconceptions of primary school ( 4th- 8th grades) students that they create in the field of Algebra and to figure out in which grades these misconceptions appear and disappear during their academic career.The population of this study for the quantitative data consisted of 895 students who were attending to public primary schools which are located in Bolu central district in 2009 / 2010 Educational year. The sample for the study were chosen by means of stratified sampling.Data about students algebraic ability and misconceptions were gathered through an Algebra test. Algebra test given in Appendix-A was applied to the 4th- 5th grade students. The first 14 questions of the other Algebra test given in Appendix-B were designated for the 6th grade students, the first 24 questions for the 7th grade students and all the questions for the 8th grade students. To understand how the students interpreted the test problems and their thoughts during problem solving , four students from each grade level who scored one standard deviation above the mean (two students) and one standard deviation below the mean (two students) were randomly chosen. These 20 students were interviewed about their test solutions.In this study, it was aimed to determine how elementary students (grades from 4 to 8) percieved the variable concept, different uses of the concept of variable in these grade levels, misconceptions when learning variables, and in which grades these misconceptions are being constructed. Moreover, some recommendations were given for how to overcome these misconceptions. Earlier studies have focused on the misconceptions in algebra in certain grade levels (6,7 and/or 8); therefore, this study aimed to close this existing gap by exteding the grade level to forth and fifth.