Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A surge of recent research on fraction representation hasprovided substantial insight into how people think aboutproportional information in written, symbolic form and invisual, non-symbolic form. However, how fractions anddecimals are verbally labeled is an often-overlooked aspect ofproportion representation. In the current study, weinvestigated how adults label fractions and decimals (Study 1)and how children in a range of grades label fractions (Study2), using a novel web-based platform for accessing studentdata from real classrooms (ASSISTments). In both studies,children and adults showed remarkable consistency in thekinds of labels they used. However, there were somedifferences in label preferences across notation and grade-level. Although the relations between fraction labeling andfraction ability remain unclear, these studies provide a firstlook at the kinds of labels that people typically use andprovide some initial hypotheses for future research intosymbolic representations of proportion.