ABSTRACT
Based on the premise that secondary-level students’ algebra structure sense is rooted in structuring experiences at the primary school level, the study that is described in this chapter was designed to foster the development of 10- to 12-year-old students’ structure sense within the context of generating equivalent numerical equalities. The study, which was carried out with 6th grade students of a small Mexican community school, involved their working within a group-interview format on a variety of tasks that explored their approaches to representing equivalence and to rewriting numerical equalities in such a way that showed their truth-value. Based on a design that focused in particular on the role of decomposition in the generating of equivalent numerical equalities, the students’ thinking about equivalence was found to pass through five phases in their evolution from a computational to a structural perspective. The nature of the interviewer's interventions that were especially conducive to spurring the growth of the students’ structure sense is highlighted.
