This paper reports on the first stage of a research project still in progress aiming at identifying undergraduate students' difficulties and errors in solving linear algebra problems. Some students' difficulties related to very basic notions of vector space theory are shown and discussed with respect to both Balacheff's theory of conceptions and…

This study was designed to follow up earlier work on mapping instruction. The two main goals were to: (1) test the effectiveness of mapping instruction as a general cure for "buggy" subtraction algorithms, and (2) explore two alternative explanations of how this new form of instruction works. It was hypothesized that mapping cures bugs…

The projection of shadows task developed by Inhelder and Piaget was used to identify error patterns and solution strategies used by diverse populations in a sequence of proportion tasks. In Study A, two group tests were administered to 607 students from science and mathematics classes in grades 9 and 10. A sub-sample of 69 students was involved in…

A major problem in learning a second language is the interference of a structurally different native language. Contrastive analysis (CA) combined with learner error analysis (EA) provide an excellent basis for preparation of language instructional materials. The Yugoslav Serbo-Croatian-English Contrastive Project proved that full application of CA…