Ratio and Proportion: Connecting Content and Children's Thinking

Abstract

Twenty-four sixth-grade children participated in clinical interviews on ratio and proportion before they had received any instruction in the domain. A framework involving problems of four semantic types was used to develop the interview questions, and student thinking was analyzed within the semantic types in terms of mathematical components critical to proportional reasoning. Two components, relative thinking and unitizing, were consistently related to higher levels of sophistication in a student's overall problem-solving ability within a semantic type. Part-part-whole problems failed to elicit any proportional reasoning because they could be solved using less sophisticated methods. Stretcher/shrinker problems were the most difficult because students failed to recognize the multiplicative nature of the problem situations. Student thinking was most sophisticated in the case of associated sets when problems were presented in a concrete pictorial mode.