A Survey And Research For Area Measurement On Shanghai 5th,6th And 7th Students

This paper does a research on the recognition on area measurement for school students from grade 5 to grade 7 through questionnaires and interviews. The study focuses on both children's thinking about the concept of area measurement and children's approaches to area measurement through different shapes and contexts.The research discoveres that most students are used to solving Mathematics problems through exact calculation and the percentage of the students who understand the concept of the area and area measurement is very low. Meanwhile, the following findings are found:a) Children's thinking about the concept of area appears a great variety (described as size, formula, volume, and so on). Most of the students have the consciousness to measure the area, but they have a poor ability to apperceive and estimate the real size of area. Children have a well grasp of the area units, and moreover, they are easily impacted by the linear model on the enlargement and reduction of area.b) In the aspect of the measurement of area, children performance well in the square units, while they show a lack of good recognition of the continuity of area. They depend on "Length×Width" formula when facing with regular figures, and they are also easily influenced by the formula. For the area of irregular figures and surface area of solid figures, they have wrong or even no approaches since the formula can't be used here. For the area of a circle, most of the students have no idea of infinity. In summary, they performance well on the procedural problems while bad on conceptual problems.In addition, allocating various answers by the theory of SOLO, it's found that the answers focus on the M-level and R-level towards the regular figures and U-level towards the irregular figures and solid figures. Little students lies in E-level. c) As the grade increases, the approaches of the measurement of area are more and more reasonable, while they still stay on the procedural comprehension, with no qualitative breakthrough.Finally, according to the findings and conclusions, the research provids some suggestions for the teaching course and methods, the assumptions to the following studies are provided.