RUME 27
2025
Alexandria, Virginia
Undergraduate Students’ Conceptualization of Repeating Decimals
Page: 758
The mathematics education community has examined how students conceptualize repeating decimals. Yet, there is potential for further investigation of how undergraduate students conceptualize the addition of repeating decimals. This paper explores pre-service teachers’ conceptualization of repeating decimals. Each participant answered three open-ended questions, and our data consisted of these written responses. Our analysis highlighted that the school conventions hindered many participants from seeing how to add repeating decimals without truncating them. Initially, most participants viewed repeating decimals as processes that approximate rational numbers. Many participants came close to considering repeating decimals as mental objects rather than processes. Our data indicates that asking participants how they would check if they had correctly added repeating decimals enabled them to overcome epistemological obstacles that hindered them from seeing repeating decimals as numbers.