Inquiry into secondary students’ conceptual knowledge of algebraic symbolism through problem posing

Through the activity of problem posing, we inquire into the conceptual knowledge of algebraic symbolism which students develop in compulsory secondary education. We focus on identifying the characteristics of equations and systems that made the problem posing task difficult for the students; among them: the inclusion of more than one unknown and the presence of the same unknown in both sides of the equal sign, coefficient higher than two and multiplicative operations among the unknowns. We also analyze the meanings that they give to the unknowns and the operations contained in the given expressions, and identify greater facility to assign meaning to the additive structure than to the multiplicative one.