The Investigation of Primary School Students’ Ability to Identify Quadrilaterals: A Case of Rectangle and Square

Pre-service Middle School Mathematics Teachers’ (Mis)conceptions of Definitions, Classifications, and Inclusion Relations of Quadrilaterals

“…However, a pile of studies has shown that students, pre-service and in-service teachers have various difficulties related to the classifications, definitions, and inclusion relations of quadrilaterals (Akkaş & Türnüklü, 2015;Aktaş & Cansız-Aktaş, 2012;Fujita & Jones, 2006;Karakuş & Erşen, 2016;Loc, Tog, & Hai, 2017;Özkan & Bal, 2017;Türnüklü, 2014;Zeybek, 2017;Zilkova, 2015). For instance, 95% of the primary school students claimed that a square is not a rectangle (Loc et al, 2017). Furthermore, Türnüklü (2014) reported that only one pre-service middle school mathematics teacher (PMSMT) out of 15 established a correct relationship between rhombus and parallelogram (e.g., every rhombus is a parallelogram).…”

Levels of Sophistication in Elementary Students’ Understanding of Polygon Concept and Polygons Classes

“…The results of this study are a step forward in the research on the links between how the figures are perceived and how they are analyzed [22,23], describing this relationship in more detail. Specifically, we refer to the sophistication levels 2 and 3, which show the change from reasoning with a list of attributes to making mathematical sense of this list through spatial structuring as a form of abstraction [5].…”

“…Recent studies about the development of the students' understanding of shapes have allowed us to learn about the processes through which students endow mathematical meaning to parts of figures at various ages: in preschool students [11][12][13], in primary education [14,15], and in secondary education [7,[16][17][18], but less is known in primary education [19,20]. Specifically, research on the geometric thinking of primary school students suggests that conceptual development in geometry involves multiple skills and mental constructs that build upon one another [21], and that primary school students have a limited ability to recognize figures through analysis [22]. However, if students are shown a wide range of examples and non-examples of geometric figures, they were able to recognize and establish relationships between the parts of geometric shapes [23] and shifting from informal to more formal descriptions of attributes [14].…”