Measuring fences and sharing pizzas: current advances in nonsymbolic fraction interventions

Resumo

Students finalizing elementary school should successfully solve fraction arithmetic and comparison problems. However, less than 30% of eighth-grade students in the United States have accomplished these educational milestones. Fraction knowledge is vital to learning more complex math and has major implications on health and employability. Thus, it is crucial to develop educational methods to enhance fraction understanding. In contrast to these struggles with symbolic fractions, young children have surprisingly strong nonsymbolic proportional reasoning, a capacity positively related to fraction ability in older children and adults. These findings have led to educational interventions that leveraged nonsymbolic skills, primarily via numberlines, to enhance symbolic fraction understanding. In a systematic review of recent studies, we identified 22 studies (from 19 articles), which we grouped into three categories: classroom-based interventions, multiple-session training, and single-session training studies. These studies provide an optimistic picture of the malleability of students’ fractions skills. Placing nonsymbolic and symbolic representations of fractions on numberlines enhanced the fraction skills of low- and typically-achieving students, resulting in small-to-large effect sizes. These results suggest that fostering nonsymbolic skills may be necessary to address the persistent bottleneck fractions pose in mathematical knowledge.