Determining the Sources of Error in a Translation from Sentence to Equation

At least one out of three college students is likely to translate a sentence of the type “There are n times as many x as y ” into y = nx , where n is a given number (e.g., 6) and x , y are English words (e.g., students, professors). Possible sources of this reversal error were explored in a series of six studies. The principal sources were haste, failure to think of checking the equation, failure to base the equation on the meaning of the...