Mollie MacGregor

TL;DR: The authors found that the majority of students up to age 15 seem unable to interpret algebraic letters as generalised numbers or even as specific unknowns Instead, they ignore the letters, replace them with numerical values, or regard them as shorthand names.

TL;DR: This article found that students' prior experiences with solving problems in arithmetic gives them a compulsion to calculate which is manifested in the meaning they give to the unknown and how they use letters, their interpretation of what an equation is, and the methods they choose to solve equations.

TL;DR: Evidence is presented that some common misinterpretations can be explained by considering factors more accessible than cognitive level to diagnosis and possible remediation, and that difficulties in learning to use algebraic notation have several origins.

TL;DR: The authors suggest that students generally construct from the natural language statement a cognitive model of compared unequal quantities and formulate equations by trying to represent the model directly or by drawing information from it, supported by research on the comprehension of relationships by linguists, pyscholinguists and psychologists.

TL;DR: This paper investigated whether three cognitive components of language proficiency -metalinguistic awareness of symbol, syntax, and ambiguity-were associated with students' success in learning the notation of algebra.