General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) mathematics assessment previously included a piece of coursework that required learners to develop a general equation to describe the relationship between two groups of numbers on a number grid. In this author's experience, it became clear that Year 10 students often struggled to form a link…

Research studies have shown that students encounter difficulties in transitioning from arithmetic to algebra. Errors made by high school students were analyzed for patterns and their causes. The origins of errors were: intuitive assumptions, failure to understand the syntax of algebra, analogies with other familiar symbol systems such as the…