Splitting Reexamined: Results from a Three-Year Longitudinal Study of Children in Grades Three to Five.

This paper is a report on the results of a 3-year teaching experiment conducted in Ithaca, New York, introducing students to the concepts of multiplication, division, and ratio as a trio, and to ratio and proportion in a project-based cuericulum with heterogeneous grouping. Fractions were introduced as a subsct of ratio and proportion. The paper outlines curricular changes in grades 3-5 and focuses on the major representational forms used by the students including: Venn diagrams, daisy chains, contingency tables, tables of values, dot drawings, two-dimensional graphs, and ratio boxes. Also discussed is the role these tools play in the development of students' understandings of the multiplicative world. Results show that these 10and 11-year-olds exceeded the comparative performance of 14and 15-year-olds on ratio and proportion test items. Contains 14 references. (Author/MKR) *********************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. *********************************************************************** Splitting Reexamined: Results from a Three-Year Longitudinal Study of Children in Grades Three to Five Jere Confrey and Grace Hotchkiss Scarano Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education (17th PME-NA, Columbus, OH, October 21-24, 1995) "PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS MATERIAi HAS BEEN GRANTED BY Do las (