Stimulating early proportional reasoning: an intervention study in second graders

Not only children but also adolescents and adults encounter great difficulties in learning to reason proportionally. Despite these difficulties, research increasingly shows that proportional reasoning emerges early, before it is being instructed in school. There have however been very few attempts t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:European journal of psychology of education 2024-06, Vol.39 (2), p.607-628
Main Authors: Vanluydt, E., De Keyser, L., Verschaffel, L., Van Dooren, W.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescents
Cognition & reasoning
Education
Educational Psychology
Elementary School Mathematics
Elementary School Students
Elementary schools
Grade 2
Grade 4
Grade 5
Intervention
Learning transfer
Longitudinal Studies
Pedagogic Psychology
Problem solving
Ratios
Reasoning
Vocabulary development
Young Children
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Summary:Not only children but also adolescents and adults encounter great difficulties in learning to reason proportionally. Despite these difficulties, research increasingly shows that proportional reasoning emerges early, before it is being instructed in school. There have however been very few attempts to stimulate this early emerging ability. The aim of the present study was to stimulate proportional reasoning in second graders. We developed an intervention program focusing on quantitative reasoning and promoting different strategies to solve proportional missing-value problems. The effectiveness of the program was evaluated in a pretest-intervention-posttest study with a control group ( n  = 139). Results showed a large effect of the intervention program on children’s proportional reasoning abilities in fair-sharing situations and a small transfer effect to word problem solving. There was also a moderate effect on the proportional vocabulary that was explicitly taught in the intervention program, but no transfer effect to proportional vocabulary not explicitly taught.
ISSN:0256-2928
1878-5174
DOI:10.1007/s10212-023-00696-3