Developing Effective Fractions Instruction for Kindergarten Through 8th Grade

Practice Guide Details

Released:	September 2010
Topic:	Math
Education Level:	Elementary, Middle Grades
Audience:	Administrator, Parent/Family, Policymaker, Researcher, School Specialist, Student, Teacher
Visit DWW:	For more on this practice guide visit Doing What Works

Authors

Robert Siegler (Chair)
Carnegie Mellon University

Thomas Carpenter
University of Wisconsin–Madison

Francis (Skip) Fennell
McDaniel College, Westminster, MD

David Geary
University of Missouri at Columbia

James Lewis
University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Yukari Okamoto
University of California–Santa Barbara

Laurie Thompson
Elementary Teacher

Jonathan Wray
Howard County (MD) Public Schools

Handy Definitions

The amount of evidence associated with a practice guide recommendation.

No causal evidence for the recommendation exists. However, the recommendation is still considered as important as recommendations with strong and moderate levels of evidence (this rating was formerly low evidence).

Evidence exists for the recommended strategy, but the evidence may not be generalizable to a wide student population or show a clear causal relationship.

Consistent evidence exists that the recommended strategy improves student outcomes for a wide population of students.

Download Practice Guide (6057 KB)

Summary

This practice guide presents five recommendations intended to help educators improve students’ understanding of fractions. Recommendations include strategies to develop young children’s understanding of early fraction concepts and ideas for helping older children understand the meaning of fractions and the computations involved. The guide also highlights ways to build on students’ existing strategies to solve problems involving ratios, rates, and proportions.

Recommendations

	Recommendation	Level of Evidence
1.	Build on students’ informal understanding of sharing and proportionality to develop initial fraction concepts. Source – 6057 KB	Minimal
2.	Help students recognize that fractions are numbers and that they expand the number system beyond whole numbers. Use number lines as a central representational tool in teaching this and other fraction concepts from the early grades onward. Source – 6057 KB	Moderate
3.	Help students understand why procedures for computations with fractions make sense. Source – 6057 KB	Moderate
4.	Develop students’ conceptual understanding of strategies for solving ratio, rate, and proportion problems before exposing them to cross-multiplication as a procedure to use to solve such problems. Source – 6057 KB	Minimal
5.	Professional development programs should place a high priority on improving teachers’ understanding of fractions and of how to teach them. Source – 6057 KB	Minimal

What Works Clearinghouse

Developing Effective Fractions Instruction for Kindergarten Through 8th Grade

Summary

Recommendations