Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous research has shown that numerical magnitude knowledge is related to current mathematic abilities andpredictive of future mathematics performance. Much of this early research examined magnitude knowledge of positive wholenumbers, more recently this has been extended to positive rational numbers. However, research about negative number mag-nitude knowledge is less abundant. The present study aims to understand how different types of magnitude knowledge relateto one another and whether performance differs according to the type of number line scale. Thirteen number line scales wereused to assess 7th grade students’ (N=180) magnitude knowledge of positive and negative, whole and rational numbers. Cor-relational analyses illustrate that performance on most scales are significantly related. Further analyses reveal that students’performance differed depending on the scale’s polarity and the number type of the scale. Moreover, performance differenceswere found to vary according to students’ mathematics classroom ability level. Educational implications are discussed.