Assessing the Difficulty of Mathematical Translations: Synthesizing the Literature and Novel Findings

Assessing students’ errors in mathematical translation: From symbolic to verbal and graphic representations

“…The results of the Sert [49] analysis indicate that students feel difficulties in verbal representation. Furthermore, one of the results of research by Bossé, et al [50] stated that generally students can translate from symbolic to graphical forms, and students are rarely able to translate from symbolic to verbal forms. Ozyildirim, et al [25] research results show that students have great difficulties in the process of translational representation, both in translating from tabular to algebraic forms, verbal algebra and verbal algebra, and diagrams to algebra.…”

“…Furthermore, in previous studies, it was also seen that most of these studies examined how students translate from verbal to symbolic forms, whereas research on students' errors in translating from symbolic to verbal and graphic forms has not been studied. Even though the ability of students to make graphical representations is very important in learning mathematics and solving problems [43,51,52] as well as the ability of students to make verbal situations in the context of everyday life is also important [50].…”

Translation Failure from Verbal to Symbolic Representations on Contextual Mathematics Problems: Female vs Male

“…Rahmawati, and Anwar [3] also stated that students were still lacking in understanding the events represented verbally. Gooding also found that most students had difficulty understanding the problem [30]. Failure at this stage affects the next stage in solving the given problem In the preliminary coordinator stage, most of the male students experienced failure.…”

“…Research on the translation of representations has been carried out by several researchers, including Swastika et al [27], Duru and Koklu [28], Hidayati et al [29], and Bosse, Gyamfi, and Cheetham [30]. From the results of research by Swastika et al [27] it was found that there are still many students who do not fully understand the importance of representation translation in solving mathematical problems, most of them only apply one form of representation as explained by the teacher, this causes the students' translation abilities to be low, in line with that Hidayati et al [29], also found the same thing where the results obtained showed that the translation ability of junior high school students in solving linear equations of one variable was included in the very poor category.…”

“…From the results of research by Swastika et al [27] it was found that there are still many students who do not fully understand the importance of representation translation in solving mathematical problems, most of them only apply one form of representation as explained by the teacher, this causes the students' translation abilities to be low, in line with that Hidayati et al [29], also found the same thing where the results obtained showed that the translation ability of junior high school students in solving linear equations of one variable was included in the very poor category. Bosse, Gyamfi, and Cheetham [30] found that there were two most difficult representation translations where one of them is the translation from verbal representation to symbolic representation. This is reinforced by the results of research by Duru and Koklu [28] that students have difficulty in translating verbal representations into symbolic representations, and on the contrary because of their lack of ability to understand the problems given.…”