"Decimal Fractions: An Important Point"

               For this blog I will be discussing the article " decimal fractions: an important point." This article is from the March 2013 issue of Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School. This article starts off talking about how decimal points are a point of frustration for students. This is because, according to the author, students  have a lot of misconceptions about the decimal point. The author then goes into some background knowledge to help us gain some insight into how the author came about in looking into this subject of decimal point fractions. The author even gives some research to back up why students might have misconceptions about this subject. The next part of this article is about different strategies that came about from investigating and researching this subject. It even has a nice table to look at that has four misconceptions on it and explains them in a couple  different ways on the table. Those four misconceptions are longer is larger thinking, zero makes small thinking, shorter is larger thinking, and money rule. This article also talks about different student samples of work, and some of them shown on different tables.
               This article was very educational and eye opening for me. I was certainly one of the students who struggled with decimals and fractions growing up, so I am glad that I have this article to take notes on and utilize if I am ever teaching this subject or helping a student with this subject. I also love how it give samples of student's work to understand what the author is talking about. This article also made me realize just how important decimals and fractions are to everyday thinking and life. I will certainly implement this into my classroom by making sure that I have those common misconceptions learned, so that way if I see my student struggling I will have a nice starting point to go from. I will also be watching what strategies I use when teaching this subject and try some of the other strategies mentioned in this article to make sure all of my students succeed!