The goal of the proposed work is to advance our understanding of the ways in which thinking in the mathematics domain is related to the emergence of other cognitive building blocks in the early years. The project will examine whether children are better at reasoning about fractions when questions are framed in the context of social, rather than physical relationships, thereby avoiding the whole number bias that hinders understanding. The work is a collaboration between a cognitive scientist and a mathematics educator at the University of Southern Mississippi and the work will largely take place in preschools and daycare center in the Southern Mississippi Gulf Coast.
The researchers will study about 180 preschoolers in a series of randomized, controlled experiments. They will present children with simple fraction and fair sharing problems in which they will be required to reason about how one should (a) share items among friends or (b) distribute items into containers. Each problem will also be presented to the children along with prompts that are either metacognitive or not metacognitive in order to determine whether prompting children to reflect on their own thoughts and feelings facilitates their ability to solve such tasks. By systematically manipulating these strategies and contexts, the researchers hope to determine whether social cognition facilitates problem solving outside of the social domain. By examining the relationships among children?s developing fundamental cognitive capacities and their rational number concepts, the researchers hope to determine whether they develop independently or scaffold up one another. The results could have significant implications for mathematics curriculum development.
