Fractions will not be dreadful

Title: design research on mathematics education: investigating the progress of Indonesian fifth grade students’ learning on multiplication of fractions with natural numbers by Nenden Octavarulia Shanty

Fractions will always be a monster that haunted students unless teacher can package this material in such way that makes students not only understand both context and concept, but also involve in the activities to find the concept. Fruedental believes that mathematics should be meaningful to student and that could be happen when students experience mathematics as human activity.

Even though there were lots of book which could help students to conquer fractions, in other part of this world still a lot more students that have difficulties in fraction, for instance in Indonesia. It is understandable that in this vast country there are lots of students which have common difficulty in understanding fraction.

 Here, this reflection paper would tell about a paper about fractions. The activities were approached differently, so it is believed that the activities that were told in the paper can help teachers to have alternative way in teaching this particular material.

The activities done in the research were producing fractions, generating equivalencies, operating through mediating quantity, doing one own production, on the way to rules for multiplying fraction.

The first activity was producing fraction. Here, students were aimed to be able to make a construction of partitioning as part of whole, and symbolize the result if partitioning and show the result. In this first activity, Nenden used locating flag and water post in a given map and notating the fractions in empty fraction cards. This activity could be said as quite different, because here student thought about how they should divide a whole into several similar partitions.

Can be noted that in several step of the activities, the researcher used mathematics congress as  way to make students share their idea about solving given problems. And in the end, a mini lesson, students would have reflect the rule for multiplication of fraction with natural numbers.

As conclusion, Nenden stated that those activities is a good context in learning fractions where students allowed to structure and matematize in the steps. Furthermore, for further study, she suggest to related fraction and proportion.

link to get the paper click here