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Abstract
Identifying and addressing learners’ misconceptions is critical for effective mathematical instruction, as unresolved conceptual gaps hinder long-term mathematical development. Diagnostic assessment provides a valuable means of uncovering these misconceptions and informing targeted teaching strategies. Despite this, classroom practices often prioritise procedural fluency over deep conceptual understanding, allowing learners to progress without fully addressing underlying difficulties. This study investigated Grade 6 learners’ misconceptions about the division of whole numbers using a two-tier multiple-choice diagnositc test and unstructured interviews. Guided by Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy and Newman’s Error Analysis Theory within an interpretivist qualitative case study design, the study employed thematic analysis to categorise learners’ errors. The findings revealed three dominant types of errors: transformation errors, comprehension errors, and processing skill errors. These results underscore the importance of strengthening learners’ grasp of foundational concepts such as place value and mathematical language. The study recommends that teachers explicitly integrate diagnostic assessments into classroom practice and design instructional interventions that directly target specific error types, thereby supporting both conceptual understanding and procedural fluency in division.
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This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Article Type: Research Article
INT ELECT J MATH ED, Volume 21, Issue 1, February 2026, Article No: em0863
https://doi.org/10.29333/iejme/17700
Publication date: 01 Jan 2026
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