Simplification of Algebraic Expressions

A response to the Misunderstood Activity
created January 24, 2023 by Yana Sokolova (@yana_sokolova)

Number of views: 86

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The process of combining like terms in the tasks of simplification of algebraic expressions could be not fully understood by students. I do these tasks at the beginning of my course Quantitative foundations for Business. Students could be stuck with all these x, y and other similar literal coefficients. To make them more fluent I could start to replace the familiar x and y in the examples with unfamiliar letters of some completely distant alphabet to show that there`s no matter what is the name of the symbol. Or I can even draw some symbols (sun, flower, star, etc.) in the expressions instead of x, y, etc. It helps to catch the essence of the like terms. Students start to see the difference in the numerical factors more clearly, especially in the case of having many like terms in the example. It always works in the groups of the first grade, especially with the reduced hours of Mathematics in their past experience.

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