Equal sign representations in curriculum and textbooks in middle schools and students’ understanding of equal sign

The aim of the current study was to investigate fourth and fifth grade students’ equal sign conceptions in the light of the revised Turkish mathematics curriculum (MoNE, 2018) that includes newly added objectives related to the equal sign concept in fourth grade. A total of 53 students (30 fourth-grade students) participated in the study. Equal sign test (EST) was used for quantitative data collection. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to gain a deeper insight into the students’ equal sign conceptions. Moreover, the fourth and fifth grade students’ textbooks and other course materials were analysed in terms of equal sign contextual presentations. According to the quantitative analysis results, the average score of fifth-grade students was 11.21 whereas the fourth-grade students’ average score was 8.13 out of 13 in the EST. The analysis of the course materials displayed that standard contextual presentations of the equal sign, which are only helpful for teaching the operational view, have higher frequencies in fourth grade, whereas non-standard presentations are dramatically high in fifth grade. The results of the semi-structured interviews supported that both the fourth and fifth grade students have some misunderstandings of the relational meaning according to the error patterns found in the EST results.