Children’s understanding of fraction and decimal symbols and the notation-specific relation to pre-algebra ability

Talking about proportion: Fraction labels impact numerical interference in non‐symbolic proportional reasoning

“…Thus, future work should investigate other methods for counteracting this potentially negative influence of traditional fraction labels and encourage children to attend to the proportional amount when thinking about equivalent fractions. For example, we may be able to lower children's numerical interference by providing children with practice using continuous proportion (e.g., Boyer & Levine, 2015;Hurst & Cordes, 2018a) or using decimals, which children use more easily than fractions for magnitude (Hurst & Cordes, 2018b). Thus, emphasizing the continuous, equivalent nature of proportion through continuous features may help children attend to proportional information, when needed.…”

Taking the relational structure of fractions seriously: Relational reasoning predicts fraction knowledge in elementary school children

“…Despite this complexity, considerable recent work in psychology has emphasized the importance of a single interpretation: the unidimensional magnitude of a fraction (for example, its position on number line) (Siegler, 2016). These studies demonstrate that understanding of fraction magnitudes (particularly with fraction number lines) is an important predictor of fraction knowledge and overall mathematical competence (Fazio, Bailey, Thompson, & Siegler, 2014a;Hansen et al, 2017;Hurst & Cordes, 2018a, 2018bYoshida & Shinmachi, 1999) and suggest that this subconstruct should be emphasized in instruction (Fazio, Kennedy, & Siegler, 2016;Siegler, 2016). While fraction magnitude understanding is clearly important, additional relation-based approaches to fractions could complement the work done on fraction magnitudes.…”

Fraction Symbols and their Relation to Conceptual Knowledge

“…The importance of mapping formal symbols to their meanings may characterize mathematical learning at many levels. As new symbolic representations are introduced, students learn, for example, fraction, decimal, and percentage notations which need to be mapped to rational number magnitudes (Hurst & Cordes, 2018b). One way in which fraction notations are complex is that they combine integer notations to represent rational numbers.…”