Eliciting Student Judgments of Intrinsic Difficulty for Studying Student Misconceptions in Solving Basic Mathematics Items

The misconceptions of developmental mathematics students in solving basic arithmetic problems are becoming a national crisis. If instructors better understood the conceptions that students have that lead to incorrect responses when solving arithmetic problems, instruction of the material presented to the students may improve. Four groups of five students were given five basic math questions for a total of 20 questions, and the only instructions the students were given was to solve the problems out loud and to please continue talking. Their answers were transcribed and the student responses were used to create solution strategies for each of the 20 questions the students were given. Using the solution strategies enabled the determination of the of misconceptions that arise in attempting to find the correct answer to arithmetic items