RUME 14 (Volume 2)
2011
Portland, Oregon
EXTENDING A LOCAL INSTRUCTIONAL THEORY FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF NUMBER SENSE TO RATIONAL NUMBER
Page: 532
We report on the process by which we extended a local instruction theory for number sense development from the whole-number domain to the rational-number domain. Students involved in an earlier teaching experiment developed improved number sense, particularly in the form of flexible mental computation. The previous research was informed by a conjectured local instruction theory and informed the refinement and elaboration of that local instruction theory. The present study concerns a recent classroom teaching experiment in which envisioned learning routes that were developed in the context of whole-number mental computation and estimation were applied to reasoning about fraction size. In this way, the application of the local instruction theory was extended from whole-number sense to rational-number sense.