It is still very difficult for children to understand the meaning of division although various efforts for the improvement of teaching division have been implemented. Therefore overall researches which both capture difficulties and misconceptions of various kinds of division systematically and propose better way of teaching and learning of it to overcome them are required.
From this perspective, as the first step of our research, we developed six sets of test of division, for fifth and sixth graders in the elementary school and first graders in the junior high school, which could reveal difficulties of understanding the meaning of division systematically. In six sets of test, various factors of story problems of division which will be expected to affect the percentage of correct answers, such as effect of the order or value of the dividend and the divisor, effect of figures, number lines, word expressions, key words and so on, were taken into account. It is the main reason for us to develop new tests why most of previous test or studies of division only focused on specific grade or specific kind of division such as division with fractions which children have difficulties.
We conducted the longitudinal and cross-sectional survey with six tests for children at both elementary schools and junior high schools located in three prefectures: Okayama, Hiroshima and Kagoshima. This article reported results of children’s performance of solving problems of “partitive division and the extension of its meaning”, and analyzed children’s difficulties and misconceptions of them in terms of various factors of story problems of division.
