Insights to students' misconceptions in Secondary School Mathematics: Unikl Mfi lecturers' perspectives

Abstract

Secondary school is a significant period in students' mathematical development, a period in which they mould their understanding in mathematical concepts and techniques. In this period, the misconceptions of mathematical concepts may also be developed and the dangerous effect of the birth of the misconception if gone unnoticed, can tag along with the students to tertiary education level and cause confusion as new concepts are being introduced. In UniKL MFI, students are expected to master the basic mathematics skills from the secondary school so that the new concepts in Engineering Technology Mathematics can be introduced without any difficulties. But the fact that the students enrolled in UniKL MFI with preset misconceptions of mathematics in their minds, mathematics lecturers will need to be prepared in preventing the misconceptions from occurring and continuing in their students' mind. The existing of mathematical misconceptions will be the major barrier for the students to succeed in mathematics subjects enrolled in UniKL MFL. However, the re-construction of the concepts is possible if the misconceptions are detected at the early stage. The objectives of this study are to compare the misconceptions between good and weak students and to equip lecturers with information so that they can begin to re-construct students' mathematical concepts. In this study, 20 students were given a set of questions consisting of basic algebra and they were also requested to give a written explanation of every step done. Selected students were also interviewed to have a better picture about their mathematics understanding. The finding shows that the misconceptions exist in both good and weak students. The difference is just that good students have logical mathematical thinking which allows them to perform better than the weak students.