An Investigation of Elementary School 4-7th Grade Students' Ability to Link Equivalent Fractions' Symbolic and Graphical Representations*

The purpose of this study was to determine elementary school 4-7th grade students' ability to link equivalent fractions' symbolic and graphical representations. The design of this research was a survey study. The sample of the study consisted of 4, 5, 6, and 7th-grade elementary school students in the Sakarya province, Turkey. The study was conducted with 1111 students from 11 elementary schools. Representational Fluency Test (RFT) developed by Niemi (1996) was used as a measurement tool. The RFT included items involving regional areas, line segments, and set representations to assess the part-whole meaning and those involving number lines to assess the measure meaning of the rational number. As the normality assumption was violated, non-parametric tests were applied. The results of the analyses showed that the students' performance to link equivalent fractions' symbolic and graphical representations changed significantly with respect to the representation type (region-line segment, region-number line, set-line segment, set-number line, line segment- number line) and with respect to simple and equivalent fractions. Meanwhile, it was seen that as the classroom levels increased, the success rates in overall scores, representation types, except region- line segment, and simple and equivalent fractions increased.

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