Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Two common visual representations of fractions are circulararea models and the number line. The present studyexamined effects of these visual representations onacquisition of fraction knowledge. In Experiment 1,elementary school students learned aspects of fractionarithmetic with a visual representation or with standardsymbolic notation alone. Results found no advantage for theinclusion of a visual representation. In Experiment 2,elementary and middle students were tested on their ability torecognize, discriminate, and construct area models offractions and number line representations of fractions. Theresults show higher accuracy for area model questions thanfor number line representation questions. Taken togetherthese findings suggest that for fractions less than 1, simplearea models may have advantages over the number line forrecognition and discrimination of fractions representations.However, the incorporation of area models into instruction onfractions arithmetic provided no benefit over instruction withsymbolic notation alone.