Investigating Second-Grade, Urban Students' Development of Number Sense of Fractions
Arthur B. Powell, Rutgers University-Newark, collaborating with Kendell V. Ali, Newark Public Schools, Newark, New Jersey
Knowledge of rational numbers is essential for mathematical achievement (Siegler, Thompson, & Schneider, 2011) and, in turn, for access to STEM disciplines and careers. This project intends to facilitate such access for urban, low-income students by investigating the affordances and obstacles of “fractions as measures” as a cognitive vehicle to extend second-grade students' number sense of fractions. Focusing on conceptual understandings of fraction magnitude, order, equivalence, and inequality, a collaborative team of two teachers, their mathematics supervisor, a university mathematics educator will design tasks and work with 24 students in two afterschool classrooms to examine how to increase students' fraction number sense. The expected outcome is that students are conversant with fraction magnitude, order, equivalence, and inequality and view fractions as a multiplicative comparison between two quantities. This view in previous research (Empson, Junk, Dominguez, & Turner, 2005) has been underscored as critical for the successful acquisition of fraction knowledge.