Productive engagement in fractional reasoning is essential for abstracting fundamental algebraic concepts vital to college and career success. Yet, data suggest students with learning disabilities (LDs), in particular, display pervasive shortfalls in learning and mastering fraction content. We argue that shortfalls in understanding are in fact…

This qualitative document analysis study reports on opportunities to learn provided by textbooks for mathematics content courses for pre-service elementary teachers. Specifically, the study examined opportunities to engage in problem posing and quantitative reasoning, in the context of fractions, provided by six textbooks commonly used in the…

This qualitative study examines how playing levels of a fraction-themed videogame impacts students' thinking. The research question answered is: What do students' gestures reveal about the degree to which their thinking is embodied as they play a videogame that is constructed via a grounded metaphor for mathematical knowledge. Four soon-to-be…

This research is motivated by observations that show the lack of additional teaching materials in schools that facilitate students in communicating mathematical ideas (symbols, pictures, and graphs) as well as concepts related to fractions by presenting the surrounding environment as a source of learning. The purpose of this study is to reveal the…

Peer-mediated instructional strategies (e.g., peer tutoring) have been effective at teaching academic responses in previous research. This study extended the literature by programming for inference-making, or derived relations. Across two experiments, researchers investigated the use of peer tutoring and inference-making to teach…

We discuss the evolution of an instructional unit for supporting prospective elementary and middle grades' teachers' conceptions of fractions as measures. We first studied prospective teachers' conceptions of fractions using a task-based written assessment with discrete, linear, and circle representations. We designed an instructional unit that…

Educational board games are a promising teaching method due to their low cost, playful, exploratory, and engaging nature. By drawing on analogical research, we created a game whose structure of spatial relationships mirrored the structure of rational numbers. We expected that children playing this game would improve their knowledge of fractions.…

This study focuses on the knowledge base that Swedish elementary student teachers demonstrate in their solutions for six routine fraction tasks. The paper investigates the student teachers' common content knowledge of fractions and discusses the implications of the findings. Fraction knowledge that student teachers bring to teacher education has…

Incorporating visual representations, rather than strictly relying on symbolic representations, is a research-based strategy for supporting fraction learning. However, students must also make transitions between visual and symbolic fraction representations to apply the conceptual understanding they gained from visual representations to symbolic…

The purpose of the study is to investigate pre-service elementary teachers' noticing expertise of students' mathematical thinking within the context of fractions. For this purpose, 32 pre-service elementary teachers were asked to examine students' answers and ways of thinking given in written excerpts related to fractions. The data was mainly…

The literature has amply shown that primary and secondary school students have difficulties in understanding rational number size. Many of these difficulties are explained by the natural number bias or the use of other incorrect reasoning such as gap thinking. However, in many studies, these types of reasoning have been inferred from comparing…

This study examines the presence of three conceptual metaphors for fractions -- The measuring stick metaphor, Arithmetic is motion along a path, and Arithmetic is object construction -- in four common and popular Swedish mathematics textbook series for years 1-3. I analyse the introduction of fractions and the kinds of tasks students are given in…

Given that both children and adults struggle with fractions in mathematics education, we investigated the processing of nonsymbolic fractions in a continuous form of part-of-the-whole. Continuous features of nonsymbolic numbers (e.g., the size of dots in an array) were found to influence numerosity judgment, but it should be noted that the…

Students with mature number sense make sense of numbers and operations, use reasoning to notice patterns, and flexibly select the most effective and efficient problem-solving strategies (McIntosh et al., 1997; Yang, 2005). Despite being highlighted in national standards and policy documents (CCSS, 2010; NCTM, 2000), the association between…

For students to develop adequate conceptual understanding about fractions, they require experiences that afford them opportunities to think flexibly about multiple interpretations of fractions. This article presents a sequence of lessons designed to offer such experiences for students in Years 3 and Year 4. The lessons adopt a challenging tasks…