Young children solving multiplicative reasoning problems

• Autor(a) principal: Soutinho, Florbela
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Outros Autores: Mamede, Ema
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/1822/52516
• topic: Ciências Sociais::Ciências da Educação

This paper describes a study focused on kindergarten children multiplicative rea-soning. It addresses two questions: 1) how do children perform when solving multiplication, partitive and quotitive division problems? And 2) what arguments do children present to justify their resolutions? An intervention program compris-ing 4 sessions was conducted with 12 kindergarten children (5-6-years-old), from a state supported kindergarten, in Viseu, Portugal. Similar Pre- and Post-tests were used to identify changes on children’s understanding during the intervention pro-gram. In each test children solved 28 problems (18 additive structure problems; 6 multiplicative structure problems; 4 control problems on geometry) in two differ-ent consecutive moments. The intervention comprised 4 partitive division prob-lems, 4 multiplication problems, and 4 quotitive division problems. The problems were presented to the children by the means of a story, and material was availa-ble to represent each problem. After each resolution, each child was asked “Why do you think so?”. Results suggest that young children can reach success levels when solving multiplication and division problems, relying on their informal knowledge, presenting arguments that show that they are able to establish the cor-rect reasoning when solving the tasks, articulating properly all the quantities in-volved in the given problems. Results also suggest that children’s multiplicative reasoning can be enhanced when they can experience multiplicative structures problem solving, being able to interact with peers and discuss their ideas, after receiving some prompts from teacher. This study also suggests that both additive and multiplicative reasoning, in their simplistic forms, seem to be simultaneously reachable to kindergarten children, making sense to them. Educational implica-tions of these findings will be discussed.