On the Math Kangaroo Finland: Homogeneous subgroups, misconceptions and answering choices

Abstract

The Math Kangaroo is one of the biggest international mathematics competitions. In Finland, the number of participants has been around 15,000 in recent years. In this research, we considered Finnish fourth to ninth graders’ performance in the Math Kangaroo Finland 2011, 2015 and 2019. We investigated the following problems: What kind of homogeneous subgroups contestants form based on their answer choices? Can misconceptions or answering choice strategies explain answer choices that were more popular than the correct answer? The subgroups obtained by LCA were described by contestants’ general answering strategies and number of correct answers. We also looked at those wrong answer choices which were more popular than the correct one. It turned out that a strategy called estimation was a possible reason for these. Furthermore, misconceptions were more common among fourth to seventh graders’ than older students and they mostly occurred in geometry.

Keywords

• Math Kangaroo Finland
• LCA
• misconceptions
• answering strategies