Children’s gesture use provides insight into proportional reasoning strategies

Who's the winner? Children's math learning in competitive and collaborative scenarios

“…Below, we list each of these dependent measures followed by our predictions. Importantly, in line with prior research (Hurst et al, 2021; Hurst & Cordes, 2019), we predicted no significant gender differences on any of these measures in our Baseline condition.…”

“…This numerical interference, or whole number bias (Ni & Zhou, 2005), results in poorer performance on proportional reasoning tasks (Boyer & Levine, 2015; Hurst & Cordes, 2019; Jeong et al, 2007) due to an inability to inhibit a prepotent bias toward whole number information. Notably, prior work has also shown that children's abilities to inhibit this whole number bias is quite malleable and can be easily shaped by either prior experiences, the words used to describe the proportions, or gestures used when learning about proportion (Boyer & Levine, 2015; Hurst et al, 2021; Hurst & Cordes, 2019). As such, this study allowed us to explore whether distinct social contexts differentially impact the learning of proportional information and the ability to selectively attend to the task while inhibiting a whole number bias in the presence of competing numerical information.…”

Measuring Fences and Sharing Pizzas: Current Advances in Nonsymbolic Fraction Interventions

“…The second group comprised two papers that used numberlines in their training conditions, but an additional feature of the training was the main focus of the paper (e.g., feedback vs. no feedback) (Fazio, Kennedy, et al, 2016;Van Hoof et al, 2021). The last group comprised one paper that targeted young children's (five-to-sevenyear-olds) nonsymbolic proportional abilities using continuous and discrete gestures (Hurst et al, 2022).…”

“…In the last group (Discrete & Continuous Gestures, Figure 2), Hurst et al (2022) aimed to ameliorate children's difficulty with working with nonsymbolic discrete proportions by using different gestures that either highlighted the nonsymbolic proportions' segments or highlighted the magnitude as a whole (Figure 3I). More specifically, children were introduced to a character that only liked shapes with just the right amount of color and just the right amount with no color.…”

“…One possible explanation is that both discrete proportions and symbolic fractions require the same cognitive skills to overcome misconceptions about them. In fact, inhibitory control, the cognitive capacity needed to overcome pre-potent responses (Diamond, 2013), is related to both nonsymbolic (Abreu-Mendoza et al, 2020;Hurst et al, 2022) and symbolic (Avgerinou & Tolmie, 2019;Coulanges et al, 2021;Gomez et al, 2015;Leib et al, 2022) Educational and psychology research can provide complementary information on how best to improve fraction understanding. Yet, each field has its conventions and blind spots.…”