Students come to the classroom with theories that they have actively constructed from their everyday experiences. However, some of these theories are incomplete half-truths. Although such misconceptions interfere with new learning, students are often emotionally and intellectually attached to them. Some common mathematical misconceptions involve:…

Matched samples of Mexican American and Anglo children with learning difficulty referrals were compared on WISC-R subtest performance. The Mexican Americans scored significantly lower on Similarities, Arithmetic, and Picture Completion. Their Verbal and Performance IQ score discrepancies suggest that the major educational problem of this group is…

Examines comprehension of sentences with multiple negations among 71 monolingual Anglo and bilingual Hispanic undergraduate science and engineering majors. Finds that both groups misused rules of logic and natural discourse; similar groups benefited from training to eliminate inappropriate reasoning strategies, but only Anglos retained the…