Background: Research has shown that mathematics anxiety negatively correlates with primary school mathematics performance, including fraction knowledge. However, recently no significant correlation was found between fraction arithmetic performance and state anxiety measured after the fraction task. One possible explanation is the natural number…

Preservice teachers commonly struggle with topics related to fractions, ratio, and proportion. The use of double number lines can facilitate the teaching in these areas and provide autonomy and flexibility in mathematical thinking. Moreover, double number lines support many topics in the curriculum, including unit rate, convenience scaling, and…

This study focuses on the knowledge revealed and developed by Elementary Mathematics teachers, in a teacher education course related to the representation of fraction division and the flexibility of the reference unit. The teachers solved a task aimed at mobilizing (and accessing) their knowledge related to their approaches to the sense of…

The purpose of this study was to understand children's operations on fragmenting schemes while they are engaged with three different visual models, including circle, rectangle, and length model. This study was a sequential explanatory mixed method, which included two phases that happened sequentially with the dominant use of the quantitative…

Learning progressions can reflect students' continuous in-depth thinking development paths, and their establishment is an iterative process from the construction of hypothetical learning progressions to the verification of that hypotheses. Considering the limitations of the existing verification method of learning progressions based on a rule…

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 present study examined preservice elementary teachers' performance on the problems of multiplication and division of fractions and compared their performances and analyzed the misconceptions. An instrument including 11 fraction multiplication and division tasks was given and the task involved three contexts: making own story problem,…

The complexity of understanding unit fractions is often underappreciated in instruction. We introduce a continuum of children's understanding of unit fractions to explore this complexity and to help teachers make sense of children's strategies and recognize milestones in the development of unit-fraction understanding. Suggestions for developing…

As digital technology use increases in K-12 education, greater numbers of strategies become available to support students in mathematics. One technology that provides students diverse representations of mathematical concepts is virtual manipulatives. Although instruction featuring representations with physical manipulatives possesses a large body…

How teachers interpret and express fractions critically influences their teaching and their students' fraction knowledge. Internationally, the mathematics education community has been studying ways to enhance preservice elementary teachers' rational number knowledge, particularly fractions. To address the challenge of augmenting pre-service…

It is critical that elementary students develop understanding of fractional numbers because understanding concepts such as fraction magnitude predict later mathematics success. Representing fractions in multiple ways assists students in developing a sense of fraction magnitude. A systematic approach to presenting multiple representations is the…

Nat Banting, argues that the "invert and multiply" algorithm for division of fractions is, in fact, not an algorithm. He suggests that Liping Ma's (1999) algorithm, which involves writing the fractions with a common denominator and then dividing the numerator of the first fraction by the numerator of the second fraction, is better as it…

Lesson study, especially when conducted with support from targeted resources, is often identified as a potentially effective means to support teacher learning. In this study, 80 school-based teams of educators, representing 80 classrooms of third- or fourth-grade students in the US, were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: lesson study…

This article investigates the interplay of time words with how children position hands on an analog clock. Using a mathematics discourse framework (Sfard, 2008), we analyzed how students interpreted precise (e.g., 2:30) and relative (e.g., half past 11) times, finding that particular words are dynamically interwoven with activity. Interviews with…