Algebra Education: Exploring Topics and Themes

Abstract

Nowadays, algebra education is subject to worldwide scrutiny. Different opinions on its goals, approaches and achievements are at the heart of `math war' debates that are taking place in many countries (Klein, 2007; Schoenfeld, 2004). Crucial to these debates is the relationship between procedural skills and conceptual understanding in teaching and learning algebra. On the one hand, computational skills are seen as a prerequisite for conceptual understanding (US Department of Education, 2007). Complaints from tertiary education focus on the lack of such procedural skills, and in several countries higher education is using entrance tests involving basic algebraic skills. Faculty members are often disappointed with students' results on such tests. Secondary school teachers, accused of being too soft on teaching skills, may in turn respond with complaints about the declining level of arithmetic skills that students acquire in primary school; as a result, they lack the elementary number sense and the factual knowledge to recognize 144 as the square of 12 or to notice that there is a relationship between 12/16 and 3/4.