Piloting an Assessment of Elementary Children's Unit Coordination Related to Multiplicative Reasoning

• In Event: Roundtable Session 11
  In Roundtable Session: Student Reasoning and Understanding in K–12 Mathematics Classrooms

Abstract

Multiplicative reasoning is essential for students’ understanding of proportional reasoning and fraction operations (Lamon, 1993; Hackenberg, 2010). Although the field’s understanding of children’s multiplicative schemes has grown over the past 30 years, relatively few studies have examined the development of multiplicative concepts with whole numbers, and even fewer have studied this phenomenon at scale. The present study reports on the development of an assessment of elementary students’ multiplicative concepts with whole numbers that can be used at a large scale. Preliminary findings suggest the assessment has sufficient reliability and validity. Further, findings suggest that while most third-grade students sampled can use strategies for iterating/skip-counting to solve multiplicative tasks, reversibility of this scheme is less prevalent.

Authors

• Karl Wesley Kosko, Kent State University

• Rashmi Singh, Kent State University - Kent