Students come to the classroom with theories that they have actively constructed from their everyday experiences. However, some of these theories are incomplete half-truths. Although such misconceptions interfere with new learning, students are often emotionally and intellectually attached to them. Some common mathematical misconceptions involve:…

College students who were either monolingual speakers of English or bilingual Hispanics participated in two studies dealing with the comprehension of sentences containing negations. Both the influence of different sentence constructions on comprehension, as well as the heuristics and misconceptions exhibited by subjects as they attempted to…

This study investigated the performance of 14 Hispanic and Anglo ninth graders on several problem-solving tasks, with the focus on the interplay of language-related factors in translating several mathematical statements expressing relationships among variables into mathematical equations. (MNS)