Shuyuan Yu, Pooja Sidney, Dan Kim, Clarissa A Thompson, John E Opfer
Fractions are the gatekeepers to advanced mathematics but are difficult to learn. One powerful learning mechanism is analogy, which builds fraction understanding on a pre-existing foundation of integer knowledge. Indeed, a short intervention that aligned fractions and integers on number lines improved children's estimates of fractions (Yu et al., 2022). The breadth and durability of such gains, however, are unknown, and analogies to other sources (such as percentages) may be equally powerful. To investigate this issue, we randomly assigned 109 fourth and fifth graders to one of three experimental conditions with different analogical sources (integers, percentages, or fractions) or a control condition...
April 2, 2024: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology