70% of American students do not understand the equal sign

Employees of the University of Texas (Texas A & M) conducted a study and found that 69.9% of American middle school students do not understand the meaning of the equal sign (=). According to them, this is a depressing statistic, because the concept of symbols "equal", "more" and "less" is taught from kindergarten and is extremely important for the development of abstract thinking and logic. For comparison, similar studies in South Korea and China showed that there is no such problem there and about 100% of students understand the meaning of this sign. Apparently, the problem is precisely in the US primary education system.

Students for verification needed to add expressions like this:

4 + 3 + 2 = () +2
')
The correct answer is

4 + 3 + 2 = (7) +2

At the same time, most American students complement this expression in accordance with the patterns of arithmetic operations familiar to them from school:

4 + 3 + 2 = (9) + 2 = 11

In other words, they simply memorize procedures without an understanding of the mathematical basis.