Relationships among computational performance, pictorial representation, symbolic representation and number sense of sixth‐grade students in Taiwan

Abstract

Abstract Twenty classes in ten schools with 627 sixth‐grade students in five cities in Taiwan participated in this study. The research provides information on the performance differences among written computation, pictorial representation, symbolic representation and number sense. The results of One‐way ANOVA analysis indicate that significant difference was found among WCT, PRT, SRT and NST tests, with F=536.327, p=0.000. The a posteriori comparisons show for each pair (WCT vs PRT, WCT vs SRT, WCT vs NST, PRT vs SRT and SRT vs NST) significant difference at the 0.001 level (p=0.000), except for the pair comparison between PRT and NST. This implies that these Taiwanese students were highly skilled in written computation but their written skills were not equally transferred to use of non‐computational paths that depended on symbolic representation, pictorial representation and number sense to solve similar problems. Keywords: Number sensePictorial representationSymbolic representationWritten computation Notes Corresponding author: Graduate Institute of Mathematics Education, National Chiayi University, 85, Wen Lung, Ming‐Hsiung, 621 Chiayi, Taiwan, ROC. Email: dcyang@ms21.hinet.net