How Do Fair Sharing Tasks Facilitate Young Children's Access to Fractional Concepts?
Abstract
The National Science Foundation funded a 2-year program in the US to investigate the cognitive and mathematics development of children aged 3–6. Interview and assessment data of children’s strategies to solve fair sharing tasks involving fractional quantities are reviewed. Children were asked how snacks could be shared among differing numbers of friends (social condition) or to distribute items into containers (physical condition). Some children demonstrated a qualitative understanding of fractional unit and with increasing grade level we observed an increased quantitative understanding. In addition, we documented significant relationships between children’s emerging causal reasoning, verbal IQ, and mathematics performance.
This paper has been withdrawn.