The construction of a double-entry table: a study of primary and secondary school students’ difficulties

• DOI: 10.1007/s10212-010-0046-1
• Publication Date: 2010-11-04T16:14:10Z
• Authors: Eduardo Marti; Merce Garcia-Mila; Fernando Gabucio; Katerina Konstant...
• Keywords: 4. Education; 05 social sciences; Educació primària; Secondary education; Alfabetització visual; Cognition; Visual literacy; Cognició; Educació secundària; Primary education; 0503 education

Tables are a presentation format that is commonly used to organize information, and they are widely present in many scenarios of our students' everyday activities; however, there is a scarcity of studies devoted to their analysis. Some of these studies point out that the organization of data into a double entry table presents difficulties for primary and secondary school students. The present study analyzes the following: 1) the level of competency of primary and secondary school students in constructing a double entry table from a set of data and 2) the main difficulties encountered by these students during the task. Our findings showed that the percentage of middle school students who succeeded in contructing a conventional table was relatively low, and the number did not significantly increase over four school years. A set of difficulties is identified and discussed in terms of cognitive and graphical processes