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.
1
Build on students’ informal understanding of sharing and proportionality to develop initial fraction concepts.
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.
This practice guide was prepared for the WWC by Mathematica under contract ED-07-CO-0062.
The following research staff contributed to the guide:
Jeffrey Max, Moira McCullough, Andrew Gothro, and Sarah Prenovitz.
These videos were prepared by WestEd under the Doing What Works Contract (ED-PEP-11-C-0068).
All videos are based on recommendations from the WWC practice guides and are designed to complement the guides.
Robert Siegler (Chair)
Carnegie Mellon University
Play an interview of Panel Chair, Robert S. Siegler: The Importance of Fractions Instruction (5:36 minutes)
What Works Clearinghouse released a webinar for educators on evidence-based resources to improve STEM skills for students in elementary, middle, and high school. Experts and educators discussed exampl...
These tips are supported by research evidence that meets What Works Clearinghouse design standards and are based on a practice guide authored by a panel of experts: Robert Siegler, Thomas Carpenter, Frances (Skip) Fennell, David Geary, James Lewis, Yukari Okamoto, Laurie Thompson, and Jonathan Wray. To learn more about this evidence base, read the practice guide, Developing Effective Fractions Instruction for Kindergarten Through 8th Grade (https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/practiceguide/15).
This infographic provides examples from three practice guides about secondary school instruction in math that can be implemented for free or at a low cost in remote learning settings.
This infographic provides examples from three practice guides about elementary school instruction in math that can be implemented for free or at a low cost in remote learning settings.
This protocol guided the review of research that informed the recommendations contained in the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) practice guide Developing Effective Fractions Instruction for Kindergarten Through 8th Grade, published in September 2010
Practice Guide
Resources
Newsflash
Contact Us
Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
