Impacts of number lines and circle visual displays on caregivers' fraction understanding.

Playful fraction picture books, together with math instructional content called "back matter," may promote fraction learning, which is crucial because fractions are difficult and often disliked content. However, open questions remain regarding how different types of back matter may affect caregivers' ability to use fraction picture books as a teaching tool. The current study offers a novel investigation into how back matter affects caregivers' (N = 160) fraction understanding (i.

Attending to what's important: what heat maps may reveal about attention, inhibitory control, and fraction arithmetic performance.

Math proficiency is an important predictor of educational attainment and life success. However, developing mathematical competency is challenging, and some content (e.g.

Task features change the relation between math anxiety and number line estimation performance with rational numbers: Two large-scale online studies.

Math performance is negatively related to math anxiety (MA), though MA may impact certain math skills more than others. We investigated whether the relation between MA and math performance is affected by task features, such as number type (e.g.

Number lines can be more effective at facilitating adults' performance on health-related ratio problems than risk ladders and icon arrays.

Visual displays, such as icon arrays and risk ladders, are often used to communicate numerical health information. Number lines improve reasoning with rational numbers but are seldom used in health contexts. College students solved ratio problems related to COVID-19 (e.

Leveraging Math Cognition to Combat Health Innumeracy.

Rational numbers (i.e., fractions, percentages, decimals, and whole-number frequencies) are notoriously difficult mathematical constructs.

From integers to fractions: The role of analogy in developing a coherent understanding of proportional magnitude.

Children display an early sensitivity to implicit proportions (e.g., 1 of 5 apples vs.

Confidence in COVID problem solving: What factors predict adults' item-level metacognitive judgments on health-related math problems before and after an educational intervention?

Unlabelled: The advent of COVID-19 highlighted widespread misconceptions regarding people's accuracy in interpreting quantitative health information. How do people judge whether they accurately answered health-related math problems? Which individual differences predict these item-by-item metacognitive monitoring judgments? How does a brief intervention targeting math skills-which increased problem-solving accuracy-affect people's monitoring judgments? We investigated these pre-registered questions in a secondary analysis of data from a large Qualtrics panel of adults ( = 1,297). Pretest performance accuracy, math self-efficacy, gender, and math anxiety were associated with pretest item-level monitoring judgments.

Math matters: A novel, brief educational intervention decreases whole number bias when reasoning about COVID-19.

At the onset of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) global pandemic, our interdisciplinary team hypothesized that a mathematical misconception-whole number bias (WNB)-contributed to beliefs that COVID-19 was less fatal than the flu. We created a brief online educational intervention for adults, leveraging evidence-based cognitive science research, to promote accurate understanding of rational numbers related to COVID-19. Participants from a Qualtrics panel (N = 1,297; 75% White) were randomly assigned to an intervention or control condition, solved health-related math problems, and subsequently completed 10 days of daily diaries in which health cognitions and affect were assessed.

Perceptions of ease and difficulty, but not growth mindset, relate to specific math attitudes.

Background: People report negative attitudes towards fractions and percentages relative to whole numbers (WNs, Sidney, Thompson, Fitzsimmons, & Taber, 2021), and these attitudes may relate to an individual's interpretation of what experiences with these number types signify. Because fractions are challenging, individual differences related to beliefs about challenge, such as endorsement of a growth versus fixed mindset (Dweck, 2006) and interpretations of easy or difficult experiences (Fisher & Oyserman, 2017), could relate to attitudes towards fractions relative to other number types.

Aims: Two studies tested whether gender, math skills, mindset beliefs, and perceptions of difficulty relate to negative math attitudes towards specific number types.

Do adults treat equivalent fractions equally? Adults' strategies and errors during fraction reasoning.

Understanding fraction magnitudes is important for achievement and in daily life. However, adults' fraction reasoning sometimes appears to reflect whole number bias and other times reflects accurate reasoning. In the current experiments, we examined how contextual factors and individual differences in executive functioning (Experiment 1), knowledge of fraction equivalence (both experiments), and strategy use (Experiment 2) influenced adults' fraction reasoning.