Personal Need for Structure and Fractions in Mathematical Education

Abstract

The research was aimed at finding relations between mathematical knowledge and cognitive individual variable. We realized the experiment with 162 students of the Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, Slovakia. We had two variables—the personal need for structure (PNS) as a cognitive-individual variable and knowledge of the fraction as a mathematical variable. The relationships between the factors of the personal need for structure scale and the knowledge of fractions were determined by the IRT model. We have proven a negative correlation between the successful solving of fraction test and score in the PNS scale. This means that the higher the success rate of solving the fraction tasks, the lower the overall score on the personal need for structure scale and its subfactors.

Keywords

• personal need for structure
• mathematical knowledge
• fraction test
• Sfard’s theory of reification
• the IRT model