Investigation of misconceptions and errors about division operation in fractions

Abstract

This study reports errors and misconceptions about division operation in fractions made by eighth-grade students. To investigate these errors and misconceptions, the study examined students’ understanding of division operation in fractions using a questionnaire and expectation table. Students’ misconceptions were determined for each question and compared with the expectation table. Common misconceptions of this research are; misunderstanding of word problems, incorrectly generalization of learned rules for fractions, considering numerator and denominator as integer numbers, not conceptually learning of division operation in fractions, associating division with addition, subtraction and multiplication operations. Students made same misconceptions with the expectation table.