The supplemental lesson teaching material is high-school and college students' understandings and skills in elementary algebra

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Two-hundred and sixty college students were tested about their understandings and skills in algebra of junior high school level. The analysis of their answer scripts revealed that they had an conceptual bug, or implicit knowledge about literal expression. About 60% of the college students expressed"sum of an odd number and another odd number"as (2n+1)+(2n+1), while the correct one being (2m+l)+(2n+l) or the like.One teaching-learning strategy were proposed against the conceptual bug : rewriting the problem into the version with a more concrete cover story.The effectiveness of this strategy was suggested by the result of a pretest-treatment-posttest designed experiment, where high school students learned the rewritten version (as the treatment, and the original version(as an control) of the problem.