Equal Sharing and Shared Meaning: The Development of Fraction Concepts in a First-Grade Classroom

Work on learning from a situative point of view suggests that to understand how children's thinking about a domain such as fractions develops, research needs to take into account the socially organized ways of thinking in which children participate during instruction. The aim of the study reported in this article was to explore children's fraction learning in a 1st-grade classroom in which the teacher elicited and built on children's informal knowledge of fractions. Instruction revolved around children's solutions and discussions of equal-sharing tasks. The study provides an account of children's learning that examines the relation between classroom talk and children's evolving fraction concepts, with a focus on the analysis of several key classroom interactions that resulted in cognitive change. Pretests and posttests indicated that children's understanding of fractions changed in important ways. The results suggest that how children think about fractions is influenced not only by how their own knowledge is structured but, perhaps more profoundly, by how the context for thinking about and discussing fractions is structured.