RUME 25
2023
Omaha, Nebraska
"Just Get Rid of It:" Students' Symbolic Forms for Cancellation
Page: 394
Students use symbolic manipulations when performing cancellation as they solve equations. Rather than performing rote manipulation of symbols, we want students to understand the meanings that these symbols convey. In this paper, we examine three pre-service mathematics teachers’ symbolic forms for additive, multiplicative, and compositional cancellation. Students used symbol templates where they either wrote both the identity and inverses, one but not the other, or neither. We further explore students’ varied conceptual schemas associated with these templates, as well as the relationships that exist among these symbolic forms.