Danish Students’ Understanding of Fractions: A Replication Study

In this paper, we report on a conceptual replication of a fractions test originally administered in the 1970s in England as part of the ‘Concepts in Secondary Mathematics and Science’ (CSMS) research programme documenting lower secondary students’ understanding of mathematics. We present data from a recent study conducted in Denmark with 336 students aged between 12 and 14 years, presenting descriptive results as in the original research. In addition, we use Rasch modelling — a technique that was not widely used in the 1970s — to further analyse the students’ understanding of fractions and to validate the test. Our findings indicate that Danish students’ fractional understanding in word or diagrammatic contexts is slightly stronger in comparison to that of the English students in the original study, whereas the case for computations involving fractions is the reverse. We discuss the possible reasons for these differences. Our study provides evidence that fractional knowledge involves a number of components and suggest ways in which the test might be improved