Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Non-symbolic ratio processing and symbolic fraction processing both involve thinking about relations between two partsand relational thinking. Despite the close connections between non-symbolic ratio and symbolic fractions, previous re-search on non-symbolic ratio processing and symbolic fraction learning have proceeded separately. The current researchinvestigated whether children’s non-symbolic ratio sense support their symbolic fraction success. Using sample of 151children, we found that non-symbolic ratio sense significantly predicted fraction knowledge assessment scores and sym-bolic fraction comparison performance, but not for fraction number line estimation performance. The implications of thesefindings for theories of numerical development and for improving mathematics learning are discussed.