A collection of papers originally written to stimulate discussion in the AAMT Virtual Conference 2004.
This topic was chosen for the Virtual Cnference because it is one that challenges teachers at all levels of schooling. There wouldn’t be an issue if the students have been carefully introduced to the idea of fractions, become familiar with different representations (decimals, ratios etc.) that are important components of proportional thinking, moved to operating with numerical fractions and then used this knowledge and skills fluently when working with algebraic fractions. Not much to ask!
Several papers were written focussing on teaching and learning at different levels of schooling: