Reasons for college students making reversal errors translating a sentence to an equation were explored in six studies. The principal sources were haste, failure to check, failure to base the equation on the sentence meaning, and use of nonalgebraic symbols. Students could successfully check when prompted. (MNS)

Data indicate that relatively advanced science-oriented college students can experience serious difficulties in symbolizing certain meaningful relationships with algebraic equations. Reversal errors in formulating equations were seen to stem from two main sources: (1) a syntactic word order matching process and (2) a semantic static comparison…

Information processing researchers have assumed that algebra symbol skills depend on mastery of the abstract rules presented in the curriculum (Matz, 1980; Sleeman, 1986). Thus, students' ubiquitous algebra errors have been taken as indicating the need to embed algebra in rich contextual settings (Kaput, 1995; National Council of Teachers of…