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Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 152 (2014) 569 – 574

ERPA 2014

Misconceptions of elementary school students about comparing

decimal numbers
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Abstract

In the current study, it was aimed to investigate the misconceptions regarding comparing the decimal numbers. One hundred and
eighty-WKUHH HOHPHQWDU\ VWXGHQWV  IHPDOH DQG  PDOH IURP WK WK DQG WK \HDU RI DQ HOHPHQWDU\ VFKRRO LQ (OPDOÕ
(Antalya) constituted the sample group of the study. A one-page Decimal Comparison Test (Moloney & Stacey, 1996) was used
for data collection and results were analyzed based on the misconceptions mentioned in the related literature: “whole-number
rule”, “fraction rule”, and “zero rule”. Descriptive and inferential statistics were conducted. Post-hoc comparisons using the
Tukey HSD test indicated that 6th year students (M= 10.60, SD= 3.54) had significantly less number of misconceptions than 7th
year students (M=8.87, SD= 3.03) and 8th year students (M= 8.06, SD=3.32). 7th year students did not differ significantly from
8th year students. According to results of the study, for the whole number misconception, 6th year students had less number of
misconceptions compared to others. 7th year students had less number of zero rule misconceptions than the others. On the other
hand, for the fraction rule misconception, 7th year and 8th year students had more misconceptions than 6th year students.
©
© 2014
2014 The Authors. Published
The Authors. Published by
by Elsevier
Elsevier Ltd.
Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the Organizing Committee of the ERPA Congress 2014.
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).
Peer-review under responsibility of the Organizing Committee of the ERPA Congress 2014.
Keywords: misconception; elementary; decimal numbers

1. Introduction

Recently, most of the studies in the field of education are related to determining the misconceptions of students
and analyzing the lack of their knowledge (YÕOPD] Students have misconceptions because of many reasons.
For instance, using only teacher-centered approaches, lacking of depth in the curriculum, not establishing

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +0-312-210-7505; fax:+0-312-21-7984.

E-mail address: medeniz@metu.edu.tr

1877-0428 © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).
Peer-review under responsibility of the Organizing Committee of the ERPA Congress 2014.
doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.09.245
570 Deniz Mehmetlioğlu / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 152 (2014) 569 – 574

connectivity between the subjects and concepts, not relating to subjects to daily life, not encouraging the students to
participate in the subjects, not paying attention to student’s prior knowledge, inappropriate teaching style, teachers’
own misconceptions, and teaching the concepts to students in a wrong way are the important factors of
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It is more important to identify the misconceptions and looking for the solutions in order to put away them
because prerequisite knowledge and conceptions generates a step for later subjects. Therefore, even a simple
misconception in mathematics may cause some misconceptions in the subjects which are related to previous one.
Like many subjects in mathematics, students have also more misconception in the subject of decimal numbers
<ÕOPD] Similarly, in their study, Steinle and Stacey (2003) indicate that understanding decimal notation is
challenging and most of the students have difficulty in understanding.
In conclusion, there is a broad diversity of misconceptions in which students interpret decimal numbers.

1.1. Misconceptions about decimal numbers

Students have difficulty in comparing the decimals and they make a relationship between the length and
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decimal numbers and conducted the test at three elementary schools for 5th year students. Outcomes of the study
showed that the misconceptions of students reduced when the length of the decimals part were the same. Moreover,
LQ %LOJLQ¶V DQG $NED\ÕU¶V VWXG\  D WHVW ZDV FRQGXFWHG WR WK DJH groups students in Van. The test was
prepared to find out the misconceptions of the students in comprehension decimal numbers. Outcomes of the study
showed parallelism with the previous studies. It was understood from the studies that students see the decimal
numbers as if they were cardinal numbers.
In Behr and Post’s study (1992), a student said that 0.37 was bigger than 0.73. According to students, 0.37 was
three tens and seven hundreds where 0.73 was seven tens and three hundreds. It is clear that student used whole
number reasoning strategies for decimal understanding. This situation is very common between the students.
Steinle, Stacey and Chambers (2002) organized the misconceptions in three groups according to how the child
orders decimals. First group is that students generally think a longer decimal is a bigger number than shorter one,
namely, longer is larger misconception. It includes whole number thinking, column overflow thinking, zero makes
small thinking, and reverse thinking. Secondly, students generally think a shorter decimal is bigger than a longer
decimal, namely, shorter is larger misconception including denominator focused thinking, reciprocal thinking, and
negative thinking. Lastly, students generally decide one of them is larger but sometimes not for the right reasons,
namely, consistency of students’ thinking. It involves equalizing length with zeros, left to right comparison, money
thinking, and special difficulties with zero. On the other hand, some researchers gave different names for those
classifications. For instance, Resnick, Nesher, Leonard, Magone, Omanson and Peled (1989) prepared a test related
to comparing decimal numbers. They employed the test to some students in USA, Israel, and France. They saw that
students’ misconceptions were also systematic. These researchers named them the “whole-number rule”, “fraction
rule”, and “zero rule”. Likewise, in their study, related to whole-number rule Sackur-Grisvard and Leonard (1985)
found that some students selected the number with the most digits after the decimal point as the largest one. In other
words, they would say 4.125 is bigger than 4.7 because the whole number 125 is greater than 7. It looks like the
longer is larger misconception I mentioned before. In addition, Sackur-Grisvard and Leonard (1985) found that
some students selected the number with the least digits to the right of the decimal point as the largest. To illustrate,
they would say that 2.3 is larger than 2.67. Sometimes, they puzzle .3 with 1/3 and .67 with 1/67. They gave the
same result, but they have a different reason. It looks like the shorter is larger misconception. Lastly, regarding zero
rule, students know decimals beginning with zero are small. Specifically a zero in the tenths column makes a
decimal part small. Briefly, this study aims to look for answers for the questions below;
Is there a statistically significant difference in decimal comparison test scores for 6th year students, 7th year
students and 8th year students?
What are the decimal comparison misconception levels for 6th, 7th, and 8th grade students?
 Deniz Mehmetlioğlu / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 152 (2014) 569 – 574 571

2. Method

2.1. Participants

Totally, one hundred and eighty-three elementary students (101 female and 82 male) from 6th year, 7th year, and
WK \HDU RI D HOHPHQWDU\ VFKRRO LQ (OPDOÕ $QWDO\D FRQVWLWXWHd the sample group of the study. Convenience
sampling was used since the researcher was able to reach easily the students participated in the study.
The distribution of elementary students (N = 183) by the year level and gender are presented in Table 1.

Table 1. Participants’ demographic data

Variable N %
6th year 73 39.9
Year 7th year 47 25.7
8th year 63 34.4
Female 101 55.2
Gender
Male 82 44.8

2.2. Instrument

A one-page Decimal Comparison Test (Moloney & Stacey, 1996) was used for data collection. Only instruction
(For each pair of decimal numbers circle the one which is LARGER) at the top of the page is translated into Turkish
and a sentence (Why did you choose it?) was added in order to see the misconceptions students have. For content
validation purposes, three researchers from mathematics education and one teacher reviewed the items in terms of
face validity. They found it appropriate for students and students were given 20 minutes to complete it.
The scale includes 15 questions. Because of its easiness of administration and its power to diagnose
misconceptions, we decided to conduct this test. Moreover, in the literature, most students answer consistently in
this test, which means the reliability of this test is high (Steinle & Stacey, 2004). Cronbach's Alpha is the most
commonly used measure for assessing the consistency (Hair et. al., 1998) and there is a general agreement that the
lover limit for Cronbach's Alpha should be .70. In the present study, Cronbach's Alpha value was found as .77.

2.3. Data analysis

Descriptive and inferential statistics were conducted via SPSS software program. The responses to each item
were referred either 1 or 0. For correct items a score of 1 was given while for false items a score of 0 was given.
The first research question was investigated by employing One-Way Analysis of Variance (one-way ANOVA)
since the study aimed to investigate the difference between the mean scores of three groups of people (Pallant,
2007). The second question was investigated through descriptive statistics by using three classification, namely,
whole-number rule items (a,b,c,d,e), zero-rule items (f g, h, i, j), and fraction-rule items (k, l, m, n, o).

3. Results

3.1. Research question 1

According to Pallant (2007), one-way between-groups ANOVA is used when there is a one dependent
continuous variable (total scores) and one independent variable with three or more levels (6th, 7th, and 8th year
students). Table 2 illustrates the results of the ANOVA.
572 Deniz Mehmetlioğlu / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 152 (2014) 569 – 574

Table 2. ANOVA results concerning the distribution of decimal comparison test scores according to year
Source of the
Variance Total Square df Mean Squares F p
Between groups 228.77 2 114.38 10.26 .00
Within groups 2006.46 180 11.15
Total 2235.22 182

A one-way between-groups analysis of variance was conducted to explore the grade level difference on total
scores, as measured by the Decimal Comparison Test (DCT). Subjects were divided into three groups according to
their year (Group 1: 6th year students; Group 2: 7th year students; 8th year students). There was a statistically
significant difference at the p < .05 level in DCT scores for the three year groups: F (2,180) = 10.3, p = .00. The
effect size, calculated using eta squared, was .10. Post-hoc comparisons using the Tukey HSD test indicated that 6th
year students (M= 10.60, SD= 3.54) had significantly less misconceptions than 7th year students (M=8.87, SD=
3.03) and 8th year students (M= 8.06, SD=3.32). 7th year students did not differ significantly from 8th year
students.

3.2. Research question 2

The second question was investigated through descriptive statistics. Outcomes are given in order:
For the whole-number rule items, while 6th year students’ did correctly the %72 of the questions, 7th year
students did correctly %55 and 8th year students did correctly %47 of the questions. The misconceptions related to
whole-number rule that students had shown below:

Fig. 1. Examples of students’ whole-number misconceptions

For the zero-rule items, whereas 6th year students did correctly the %63 of the questions, 7th year students did
correctly %66 and 8th year students did correctly %51 of the questions. The misconceptions related to zero rule that
students had shown below:
 Deniz Mehmetlioğlu / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 152 (2014) 569 – 574 573

Fig. 2. Examples of students’ zero-rule misconceptions

For the fraction-rule items, whereas 6th year students did correctly the %78 of the questions, 7th year students
did correctly %57 and 8th year students did correctly %63 of the questions. The misconceptions related to fraction
rule that students had shown below:

Fig. 3. Examples of students’ fraction-rule misconceptions

4. Discussion and conclusion

The findings of this study displayed that 6th year students had significantly less misconceptions than 7th year
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that the proportion of errors is decreased based on students’ higher grade levels. Outcomes of our study might
address that 7th year students’ and 8th year students’ understanding in comparing decimal numbers may be
procedural. In other words, they may learn this concept by heart and while comparing they may not remember the
rules.
According to results of the study, for the whole number misconception, 6th year students have less
misconceptions compared to others. Steinle and Stacey (1998) stated that certain misconceptions learned at school.
In other words, school instruction has an effect on misconception. For example, after learning a unit on fractions,
students directly show shorter is larger misconception, namely, fraction rule. Therefore, for the fraction rule
misconception, 7th year and 8th year students had more misconceptions than 6th year students.
Another outcome of the study showed that 7th year students have less zero rule misconceptions than the others. It
may be related to previous knowledge which is already familiar to students.
Moreover, Steinle and Stacey (2004) emphasized that the decimal misconceptions have a wide range of reasons,
such as inadequate instruction, deep interaction between the mind and mathematical content, misremembering rules
and drawing false analogies.
In this study, it is clear that students have serious difficulty with comparing decimals and their conceptual
understanding did not develop while selecting the larger one. Other reason for these misconceptions might be related
to teaching approach. If teachers give more importance to procedural understanding, their students absolutely might
574 Deniz Mehmetlioğlu / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 152 (2014) 569 – 574

not have conceptual understanding. Therefore, it can be suggested that teachers should show an effort to provide
students with conceptual understanding firstly and then they should develop teaching strategies.
The findings of the study also address the possible influence of connectivity on the misconceptions of students.
As stated in NCTM (2000), connectivity between subjects should be established. If the subjects are given as if they
were isolated, students have poorly integrated knowledge. Therefore, the units of decimals, fractions, and integers
should be given in a well-connected ways.
For further research, it can be suggested that besides the DCT, the misconceptions of students should be
supported and investigated by qualitative studies.

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<ÕOPD] =  øON|÷UHWLP LNLQFL NDGHPH |÷UHQFLOHULQLQ RQGDOÕN VD\ÕODU NRQXVXQGDNL NDYUDP \DQÕOJÕODUÕ 8úDN LOL |UQH÷L. Unpublished
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