This chapter focuses on the development of concepts that children draw on as they work toward understanding negative numbers. Framed from a conceptual change lens, I discuss different interpretations children have of minus signs, numerical order, numerical values, and addition and subtraction operations and how children draw on these varied…

Being able to effectively interpret students' thinking and respond effectively in the moment are important skills that preservice teachers (PSTs) need to learn. This study zooms in on 14 PSTs' planning, teaching, and reflections involved in number string lessons, and investigates to what extent PSTs anticipate their students' strategies and…

How children play around with new numerical concepts can provide important information about the structure and patterns they notice in number systems. In this chapter, we report on data from 243 second graders who were asked to fill in missing numbers on a number path (encouraging them to play around with numbers less than zero) and to solve…

The language that students use with whole numbers can be insufficient when learning integers. This is often the case when children interpret addition as "getting more" or "going higher." In this study, we explore whether instruction on mapping directed magnitudes to operations helps 88 second graders and 70 fourth graders solve…

As students progress from working with whole numbers to working with integers, they must wrestle with the big ideas of number values and order. Using objects to show positive quantities is easy, but no physical negative quantities exist. Therefore, when talking about integers, the author refers to number values instead of number quantities. The…

We investigate thirty-three second and fifth-grade students' solution strategies on integer addition problems before and after analyzing contrasting cases with integer addition and participating in a lesson on integers. The students took a pretest, participated in two small group sessions and a short lesson, and took a posttest. Even though the…

A lack of numerical knowledge early on can impede a child's academic development. In past research, playing linear board games improved children's understanding of numerical relations, which the authors theorised could extend to children with autism spectrum disorder. For this pilot study, 10 children played a board game where they moved tokens…

Linear board games have shown great promise as tools to teach whole number concepts (Ramani & Siegler, 2008), but little is known about their utility for supporting negative integer concepts. This study sought to extend the use of linear board games to teach integer concepts. Forty-eight first graders (ages 6-7) counted along an integer board…

How can children's natural perceptuo-motor skills be harnessed for teaching and learning mathematical structure? We address this question in the case of the integers. Existing research suggests that adult mental representations of integers recruit perceptuo-motor functionalities involving symmetry. Building on these findings, we designed a…