This study investigates students’ use of brackets, by Dr Athina Thoma, Dr Mustafa Güler and Dr Ioannis Papadopoulos.

In previous phases of this project, we examined the use of brackets, focusing explicitly on mental brackets, by secondary school students. We are now exploring undergraduate students’ use of both mental and unnecessary brackets when engaging with questions in algebra and calculus. Our data mainly consists of students’ written responses but we are also considering furthering our data collection to include students’ interviews and teacher’s or lecturer’s views on students’ use of brackets.