Upper Primary School Students ’ Algebraic Thinking

This qualitative research study involving 128 students in grades 4-6 was conducted to develop a framework for characterizing upper primary school students ’ algebraic thinking. Four levels of algebraic thinking were identified from student responses to tasks involving patterns and open number sentences. Level 1 students failed to understand the tasks or answered with irrelevant data. Those at Level 2 understood the tasks but were unable to proceed further. Level 3 students were able to complete the tasks but were unable to link one aspect of the task to another. Level 4 students understood the relationship among various aspects of data and used all aspects of the data. To improve students ’ learning in mathematics, it is necessary to understand the developmental mode of their thinking and reasoning. With the nature of mathematics that deals with abstract entities, students have difficulty in understanding mathematics concepts, especially those in algebra. Therefore, thinking, particularly algebraic thinking, is a tool for understanding abstraction (Russell, 1999). Typically, most school mathematics curricula separate the study of arithmetic and algebra. Arithmetic is the primary focus of elementary school mathematics and algebra is the primary focus of secondary school. So, i