Grade 10 Learners errors when operating Integers

dc.contributor.authorNaidoo, Sheldon Samuel
dc.contributor.supervisorPournara, Craig
dc.date.accessioned2024-10-12T16:27:27Z
dc.date.available2024-10-12T16:27:27Z
dc.date.issued2023-10
dc.departmentDepartment of Mathematics Education
dc.descriptionThis research study is being submitted to meet the requirements of the course Research Project for the degree of Masters in Education (Mathematics in Education) at the Faculty of Humanities, Wits School of Education, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023.
dc.description.abstractThis study focuses on learners’ errors in integers and explores the changes in their errors during their grade 10 year. The data utilised in this study was collected by the WMCS project in 2018. The data was collected from learners of 15 low-performing schools in Gauteng, South Africa. Part of this study consisted of a comparison of two groups of learner responses. The first group comprised of learners of teachers who participated in a professional development course offered by the project in 2016/2017 (TM group) and the second group are learners whose teachers did not attend the course (CNT group). These schools had no prior relationships with the Wits Maths Connect Secondary (WMCS) project. I looked at the responses that grade10 learners made when ordering and operating on integers at two different points of a school year. The tests were written in February and September of the same year and were analysed from a random sample of 196 grade 10 learners from 40 low-performing secondary schools in Gauteng, South Africa. Test items dealt with ordering of integers and operating on integers. Working from a Vygotskian perspective, a framework dealing with concept formation of negative numbers was developed to analyse learners’ test responses. In this study, I focused solely on the responses given by the learners of the two groups and explored the persistency of errors within each group as well as the type of errors found across the groups. Having this data point per learner allowed for further investigations regarding persistent errors and errors which were remediated and waned during the year. Furthermore, it provided an opportunity to detect new errors arising which would impact the learning of other topics. This framework made it possible to identify seven types of errors. The findings show that while learners’ performance improved from pre-test to post-test, many grade 10 leaners still have difficulty with the concept of negative numbers.
dc.description.sponsorshipNational Research Foundation (NRF).
dc.description.submitterMM2024
dc.facultyFaculty of Humanities
dc.identifier0000-0002-5242-1822
dc.identifier.citationNaidoo, Sheldon Samuel. (2023). Grade 10 Learners errors when operating Integers. [Master's dissertation, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg]. https://hdl.handle.net/10539/41528
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10539/41528
dc.language.isoen
dc.publisherUniversity of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
dc.rights©2023 University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. All rights reserved. The copyright in this work vests in the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
dc.rights.holderUniversity of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
dc.schoolWits School of Education
dc.subjectGrade 10 learners
dc.subjectIntegers
dc.subjectNegative numbers
dc.subjectConcept formation
dc.subjectUCTD
dc.subject.otherSDG-4: Quality education
dc.titleGrade 10 Learners errors when operating Integers
dc.typeDissertation
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