Assessing Students’ Mastery and Misconceptions in the Fundamental Operations on Integers

Abstract

One of the common misconceptions affecting mathematics performance of high school students involves operating integers. Evidently, students who were exposed to modular learning demonstrate poor mastery of the pre-requisite skills. This study aimed to assess the mastery level and misconceptions of the Grade 7 students involving operations on integers. A descriptive research design was used with a total of sixty-two (62) conveniently chosen Grade 7 students were twenty-nine (29) were males and thirty-three (33) were females. The Mean Percentage Scores (MPS) per operation on integers were calculated to describe the mastery level and the assessment results were analyzed to identify possible misconceptions of the students in operating integers. Similarly, data were analyzed using the Welch t-Test to determine if there is a difference in the level of mastery between the male and female students. Findings show that the overall MPS result is 50.56%, indicating that the students demonstrated Average Near Mastery (AVR) of the concepts involving operations on integers. In addition, there was no significant difference between the mastery level of male and female grade 7 students. Although the students demonstrated Average Near Mastery (AVR) in the given assessment, the item analysis showed various misconceptions and errors exhibited by the students regardless of sex and section. Students’ misconceptions include subtracting integers and dealing with negative numbers. Hence, an intervention is needed to address the misconceptions in subtracting integers and a reinforcement is proposed to enhance the students’ mastery in other operations on integers.