Characteristics of the development of proportional reasoning in Primary and Secondary School

Abstract

The aim of this study is to determine the variation of students’ behavioral profiles along Primary and Secondary School when solving proportional and non-proportional problems. The participants were 755 primary and secondary school students. From the analysis of students’ answers we identify five profiles indicating that primary school students use additive relationships regardless of the type of problem and secondary school students use multiplicative relationships regardless of the type of problem. These findings indicate that students’ success on proportional problems does not necessarily mean that students were able to construct the meaning of the idea of ratio.