The authors examined the thinking of children

who had the opportunity to construct personal knowledge

about division of fractions. The authors based this study on a
teaching experiment design and used relevant contexts/situations
to foster students’ development of knowledge. Participants
were a group of mixed-ability, 5th-grade mathematics
students. They used pictures, symbols, and words to resolve
situations and communicate their solutions. The authors analyzed
the solutions to describe the students’ constructions of
division-of-fractions concepts and procedures. All strategies
that the students used represented some manifestation of conceptual
knowledge about addition and subtraction of fractions
and a definition of division. Some students developed formal
symbolic procedures, and others developed pictorial procedures;
none invented an invert-and-multiply procedure.
Through the window of constructivism, this study allowed the
authors to glimpse children’s constructions of knowledge and
provided alternatives to the traditional view of the expected
procedure (invert and multiply) that children should learn for
division of fractions.
Key words: constructivism, division of fractions, ethnomathematics,
invert and multiply, problem solving
uring the late 1950s and early 1960s, researchers
worked to determine what could and should be the
conventional algorithm for division of fractions in U.S.
schools. They considered pedagogical reasons, curricular
reasons, and reasons related to learning theory. During these
considerations, two basic algorithms, invert and multiply
and common denominator, dominated the discussions.
Researchers noted advantages and disadvantages of each
algorithm. The invert-and-multiply algorithm is more efficient
(Bergen, 1966; Capps, 1962; Krich, 1964) and more
closely linked to the algebraic thinking (Chabe, 1963) that
serves as an important base in increasing sophistication of
mathematical thinking. However, students often struggle
with the algorithm, finding little sense in the procedure, opting
instead to memorize it (Capps, 1962; Elashhab, 1978;
McMeen, 1962). The common-denominator algorithm
emerges easily from whole-number thinking (Johnson,
1965) and is highly meaningful (Brownell, 1938; Capps,
1962; Miller, 1957). However, when division results in a
remainder or the divisor is greater than the dividend, the
procedure becomes cumbersome and difficult for many students
to complete accurately (Bray, 1963; Johnson, 1965).
By the mid-1980s, mathematics educators had begun to
consider more seriously the learning of mathematics
through a constructivist lens, focusing on the experiences of
the learner (e.g., Bruner, 1986; Carpenter & Moser, 1982;
Cobb, Yackel, & Wood, 1991; Schoenfeld, 1985; von
Glasersfeld, 1990). This transition away from the behaviorist
view paved the way for a dramatic shift from lecture-oriented
classrooms to classrooms in which students actively
participate. Armed with a new understanding of how children
learn mathematics, researchers and classroom teachers
reconsidered how children learn fractional ideas (Kieren,
1988; Mack, 1995; Streefland, 1978, 1991, 1993), including
division of fractions (Bates & Rousseau, 1986; Kamii &
Warrington, 1995; Nowlin, 1996; Warrington, 1997).
We also wondered about the development of division-offractions
knowledge among our fifth-grade students. In this
article, we discuss our teaching experiment conducted with
mixed-ability, fifth-grade mathematics students. We
describe the knowledge for division of fractions that our
students most commonly displayed after they encountered
realistic division-of-fractions problems. For those children
who also constructed an algorithm, we describe the algorithm(
s) they invented. Our final goals were to provide
insights that interested colleagues might want to apply to

If we subscribe to constructivism and respect the personal

nature of knowledge (Bruner, 1986; von Glasersfeld,
1990), then we must consider children’s thinking in terms
of the knowledge they build. Children build more sophisticated
knowledge on existing informal experiences from
their personal, realistic worlds (Kieren, 1988; Mack, 1995;
Streefland, 1978, 1991, 1993). Thus, we must nurture the
mathematics knowledge that develops from those experiences.
On the basis of our interpretations of our children’s
thinking, we believe that when division of fractions is part
of the late elementary/early middle school curriculum, students
will invent a common-denominator procedure
because it will be built on their whole-number knowledge
of division. All of our children resolved the situations using
division concepts built on knowledge from their existing
whole-number knowledge about division. Each child
attacked the problems with his or her unique repertoire of
knowledge. Teaching with realistic situations was powerful.
It helped students establish a procedure, in part, because the
context situations closely matched the experiences that students
had with whole-number knowledge. Throughout the
rest of the school year, many of our students approached
problems requiring fractional number operations with confidence.
They seemed to know fractions: They knew how
fractions worked, they related whole numbers to fractions,
and they made sensible decisions about fractional situations.
We believe this occurred, in part, because they were
able to build their knowledge on existing knowledge—both
ethnomathematic and whole number.
Perhaps knowing what sort of procedures for division of
fractions our students invented will encourage other teachers
and researchers to analyze their efforts to implement
constructivist-based teaching strategies for division of fractions.
Our students did not appear to be aware of an operational
inverse relationship between division and multiplication.
Hence, no knowledge existed on which they could
construct the invert-and-multiply algorithm. It seems that
trying to force a connection between the invert-and-multiply
algorithm and whole-number operational knowledge
would have been confusing to our students. Students like
those in this study, who were encouraged to construct division-
of-fraction knowledge on the basis of their unique
existing knowledge (whole-number experiences), would
find no connections. Whereas some research suggests that
346 The Journal of Educational Research
whole-number knowledge interferes with fraction-knowledge
development, we found a strategy for using students’
strong whole-number knowledge to provide a base for fraction
knowledge. For solving the everyday problems, the
common-denominator method was more obvious and useful
to our students.
REFERENCES
Bates, T., & Rousseau L. (1986). Will the real division algorithm please