Early Fraction Learning: Links with Prosociality and Self and Other Perspective Taking

这项工作的目标是促进我们对数学领域的思维与早期其他认知构建模块的出现相关的方式的理解。该项目将检验当问题被置于社会关系而不是物理关系的背景下时，孩子们是否更擅长推理分数，从而避免阻碍理解的整数偏见。这项工作是南密西西比大学的一位认知科学家和一位数学教育家的合作，这项工作将主要在南密西西比海湾沿岸的幼儿园和日托中心进行。研究人员将对大约180名学龄前儿童进行一系列随机对照实验。他们会给孩子们展示简单的分数和公平分享问题，要求他们推理一个人应该如何(a)在朋友之间分享物品或(b)将物品分配到容器中。每个问题也会被呈现给孩子们，同时还有元认知或非元认知的提示，以确定提示孩子们反思自己的想法和感受是否有助于他们解决这些问题的能力。通过系统地操纵这些策略和环境，研究人员希望确定社会认知是否有助于解决社会领域之外的问题。通过检查孩子之间的关系？在发展基本认知能力和有理数概念的过程中，研究人员希望确定它们是独立发展还是相互支撑。研究结果可能对数学课程的发展具有重要意义。

The goal of the proposed work is to advance our understanding of the ways in which thinking in the mathematics domain is related to the emergence of other cognitive building blocks in the early years. The project will examine whether children are better at reasoning about fractions when questions are framed in the context of social, rather than physical relationships, thereby avoiding the whole number bias that hinders understanding. The work is a collaboration between a cognitive scientist and a mathematics educator at the University of Southern Mississippi and the work will largely take place in preschools and daycare center in the Southern Mississippi Gulf Coast. The researchers will study about 180 preschoolers in a series of randomized, controlled experiments. They will present children with simple fraction and fair sharing problems in which they will be required to reason about how one should (a) share items among friends or (b) distribute items into containers. Each problem will also be presented to the children along with prompts that are either metacognitive or not metacognitive in order to determine whether prompting children to reflect on their own thoughts and feelings facilitates their ability to solve such tasks. By systematically manipulating these strategies and contexts, the researchers hope to determine whether social cognition facilitates problem solving outside of the social domain. By examining the relationships among children?s developing fundamental cognitive capacities and their rational number concepts, the researchers hope to determine whether they develop independently or scaffold up one another. The results could have significant implications for mathematics curriculum development.