INTRODUCTION:

A fraction (from Latin: fractus, "broken") represents a part of a whole or, more generally, any
number of equal parts. When spoken in everyday English, a fraction describes how many
parts of a certain size there are, for example, one-half, eight-fifths, three-quarters. A common,
vulgar, or simple fraction (examples: and 17/3) consists of an integer numerator, displayed
above a line (or before a slash), and a non-zero integer denominator, displayed below (or
after) that line. Numerators and denominators are also used in fractions that are not common,
including compound fractions, complex fractions, and mixed numerals.
The numerator represents a number of equal parts, and the denominator, which cannot be
zero, indicates how many of those parts make up a unit or a whole. For example, in the
fraction 3/4, the numerator, 3, tells us that the fraction represents 3 equal parts, and the
denominator, 4, tells us that 4 parts make up a whole. The picture to the right illustrates or
3/4 of a cake. Fractional numbers can also be written without using explicit numerators or
denominators, by using decimals, percent signs, or negative exponents (as in 0.01, 1%, and
102 respectively, all of which are equivalent to 1/100). An integer such as the number 7 can
be thought of as having an implied denominator of one: 7 equals 7/1.
Other uses for fractions are to represent ratios and to represent division.[1] Thus the fraction
3/4 is also used to represent the ratio 3:4 (the ratio of the part to the whole) and the division 3
4 (three divided by four).
In mathematics the set of all numbers which can be expressed in the form a/b, where a and b
are integers and b is not zero, is called the set of rational numbers and is represented by the
symbol Q, which stands for quotient. The test for a number being a rational number is that it
can be written in that form (i.e., as a common fraction). However, the word fraction is also
used to describe mathematical expressions that are not rational numbers, for example
algebraic fractions (quotients of algebraic expressions), and expressions that contain irrational
numbers, such as 2/2 (see square root of 2) and /4 (see proof that is irrational)




CONCEPTS OF FRACTIONS AND DECIMALS AND LEARNING DIFFICULTIES
The decimal numeral system (also called base ten or occasionally denary) has ten as its base.
It is the numerical base most widely used by modern civilizations. Decimal notation often
refers to a base-10 positional notation such as the Hindu-Arabic numeral system; however, it
can also be used more generally to refer to non-positional systems such as Roman or Chinese
numerals which are also based on powers of ten.
Decimals also refer to decimal fractions, either separately or in contrast to vulgar fractions. In
this context, a decimal is a tenth part, and decimals become a series of nested tenths. There
was a notation in use like 'tenth-metre', meaning the tenth decimal of the metre, currently an
Angstrom. The contrast here is between decimals and vulgar fractions, and decimal divisions
and other divisions of measures, like the inch. It is possible to follow a decimal expansion
with a vulgar fraction; this is done with the recent divisions of the troy ounce, which has three
places of decimals, followed by a trinary place.

We have found it useful to use the following model from Derek Haylock and Anne Cockburn
(Haylock and Cockburn; 1989) to consider the different mathematical elements that need to
be experienced and connected in order to create full understanding of concepts.
Haylock and Cockburn suggest that effective learning takes place when the learner makes
cognitive connections.

Let us consider a particular example in early fractions. Two children are cooking, filling a tray
of 12 cake cases. They are told they can fill half each. One child looks at the tray and says,
We can do two lines each. The other child looks at the lines and says Thats six because
three and three is six, like on a dice. The children fill six cake cases each. The cooking is the
context, the tray and dice the images, the language of fractions, division and multiplication is
used and there is the opportunity to model both 12 x 1/2 = 6, 12 2 = 6 and 6x 2 = 12
Problems can arise when not all the four elements are experienced or, if they are all
experienced, but they are not connected in a meaningful way. The role of classroom
talk/dialogue is to help the children make the connections themselves. This talk/ dialogue can
take the form of teacher questioning, children questioning, talk between children, explanation
of points of viewetc. The verbal accompaniment to the childrens experiences is what
allows them to frame their understanding. You can imagine that classroom talk/dialogue is the
arrows on the model that connect the four fields of experience.
Questions on proportion, in all its forms, are often answered poorly in national tests. There are
some common misconceptions that seem to be partly responsible. These include the belief
that: fractions are always parts of 1, never bigger than 1; fractions are parts of shapes and not
numbers in their own right;
a fraction such as is only three lots of a quarter, never a quarter of three; decimals with
more digits are bigger; and percentages can never be bigger than 100%.
Fractions objectives
List of images for teaching fractions
Fractions
One of the things we need to ensure, as teachers, is that children are given a variety of
experiences that allow them to engage with fractions as both the names of numbers and also
as operators. They can then consider where different fractions fit into our number system as
well as how to find a fraction of something.
As there is such a gap between how confident children are with whole numbers as compared
with fractions, it is useful to look at how children first learn about whole numbers. Children
are exposed to whole numbers, very early on, through the counting rhyme. This exposure is
something that can happen on an almost daily basis, other people around counting out loud in
different situations and the children are immersed in it. It can be quite sometime before they
join in with parts of the rhyme or learn the rhyme for themselves. So at the start it is about
learning a rhyme, a list of words in a particular sequence that seem to have a certain rhythm to
them.
Through learning this rhyme children become familiar with the number names, (the language
of numbers) and the order of numbers. When the rhyme is used in contexts and children count
objects they learn about how the change of number name indicates an increase of one. Later
they learn to match these to the symbols (link language to symbols. Without a background of
being immersed in counting, can you imagine how hard it would be to calculate? Children
who arrive in reception classrooms without four to five years of counting immersion are at a
serious disadvantage and struggle as a consequence.
So when we expose children to new parts of the number system we need to think about how
we can immerse them in the numbers so that the language becomes familiar and can be
connected to the symbols, contexts and images. One way to do this is through counting. With
fractions this often doesnt happen, children are introduced to the idea of fractions and are
expected to make sense of language and symbols without any immersion. There is a page in
the images section on counting in fractions.
Counting can help to address the gap in understanding fractions as numbers in their own right.
What children tend to experience early on is a fraction as an operator cut it in half, get half
of those. Understanding fractions as operators is not something particular to fractional
numbers. Children do also experience this with whole numbers give me two of those and
this is then linked very clearly to multiplication and division. Fractions are another piece to
this puzzle, another way of talking about a situation involving multiplication and division
PROPOSED STRATEGIES FOR LEARNING THE CONCEPTS OF FRACTIONS AND
DECIMALS
In this study, we investigated the difficulties encountered by primary school children when
learning fractions. One of the main goals of this study was to clarify the relationships between
conceptual and procedural understanding of fractions. In order to do so, a test was
administered in Grade 46 in classes of the French Community of Belgium. The test was
based on the different conceptual meanings of fractions, namely part-whole/partition, number,
proportion, as well as on procedural questions involving arithmetical operations and
simplification of fractions.
Globally, the results showed large differences between categories. Pupils seemed to master
the part-whole concept, whereas numbers and operations posed tremendous problems. Some
conceptual meanings, such as numbers, were less used in primary school classes. Part-whole
seems to be a concept that is widely used in the classrooms. Indeed, children performed well
in the part-whole/partition category. However, they seem to have a stereotypic representation
of fractions. Indeed, when they were asked to represent a given fraction, they mostly used a
circle or a square, even when drawing collections could have been easier (e.g., 1/7).
Moreover, when asked to select a figure representing a certain fraction, they performed better
for continuous than discrete quantities. Pupils performed well with proportion items. These
results contrast with textbooks and lessons given by teachers. In fact, the connection between
proportions and fractions is rarely made in textbooks and formal lessons, even if some aspects
of fractions are based upon proportional reasoning (e.g., the rule of three).
In the proportion category, most errors were linked to additive reasoning. For example, when
pupils are asked questions such as 3 cakes cost 12, 6 cakes cost 24, 8 cakes cost ? the
most common error would be the answer 36. In this case, children built their answer on only
a subset of the given information and they applied additive strategies where multiplicative
strategies should be used. Mistakes linked to additive reasoning are commonly reported
during early stages of children's understanding of proportional reasoning (Lesh et al., 1988).
This kind of mistakes was common in Grade 4, but could still be observed in Grade 6.
Pupils performed poorly in the numerical category. Even if children are trained to deal with
number lines from grade 4, results showed major difficulties when they were asked to place a
fraction on a graduated number line. They do not seem to have an appropriate representation
of the quantities of fractions. Other studies have reported that many pupils experience
difficulties when asked to locate a fraction on a number line. Pupils often view the whole
number line, irrespective of its magnitude as a single unit instead of a scale (Ni, 2001). When
they are asked to place a fraction between 0 and 1, pupils often place fractions disregarding
any other reference point or known fractions. Pearn and Stephens (2004) pointed out that the
incorrect location of fractions could also be the consequence of a lack of accuracy when
dividing segments.

The lack of accuracy in children's mental representations of the magnitude of fractions seems
to be confirmed by the weak percentage of correct response for questions involving sorting
out a range of fractions in ascending order. Furthermore, mean percentage of correct
responses for comparison of fractions were very low for fractions with common numerators
and fractions no common components. When fractions share the same denominator (e.g.,
2/5_4/5), the global magnitude of fractions is congruent with the magnitude of the numerators
(e.g., 4 is larger than 2). In this case, pupils could only compare the numerators in order to
choose the larger fraction. When fractions share the same numerator, the global magnitude of
fractions is incongruent with the magnitude of denominators. Thus, pupils might not take the
incongruity into account and their judgment might have been influenced by the whole number
bias (Ni and Zhou, 2005). For fractions with no common components, pupils probably only
compared numerators and denominators separately. This strategy led to larger error rates.

Focusing now on operations, children performed well in addition and subtraction of fractions
with the same denominator, while performance dropped dramatically in addition and
subtraction of fractions with different denominators. The most common errors were dictated
by the whole number bias (Ni and Zhou, 2005). For example, when asked 3/4 + 2/5 = ?, the
majority of pupils answers 5/9. Surprisingly, results were poorer for items involving the
multiplication of an integer by a fraction, than for multiplication of two fractions. In the last
case, pupils could successfully apply procedures based on natural numbers knowledge, which
would explain higher percentage of correct response. Another surprising result was the better
performance in Grade 4 than Grade 5 when children were asked to multiply an integer by a
fraction. There might be a contamination of procedures applied to addition and subtraction
with different denominators learnt in Grade 5.

Results showed massive familiarity effects in every category. Children performed
significantly better on questions including familiar fractions, such as 1/2, 1/4, or 3/4 than on
items with less familiar fractions. This could be due to the fact that the magnitude of 1/2 is
known better than other fractional magnitudes. We do not know precisely when children start
to quantify continuous quantities in informal contexts. Bryant (1974) suggests that children
are able to understand part/part relations before part/whole relations. Relations such as larger
than/smaller than and equals to could be the first logical relationships used at the
beginning of fraction learning. Spinillo and Bryant (1991) designed experiments to analyse
how 4- to 7-year-olds use the concept of half in equivalence judgment tasks. Their results
suggest that using the concept of half would be the first step in relationships used by children
to quantify fractions.

Desli (1999) also investigated the role of half by examining part/whole relationships. 6- to 8-
year-olds were told that two parties had been organized and that chocolate bars would be
equally distributed among children. They had to judge if they would receive the same amount
of chocolate bars in both parties, and if not, in which party they would get more chocolate
bars. Children had ceiling performance when they could use half as a reference. In the
condition where they could not use half as a reference, only 8-year-olds had performance
above chance. Desli (1999) also showed the importance of the concept of half in the
construction of fractions quantifications. In a recent study using a fraction-based judgment
task, Mazzocco et al. (2013) showed that fractions equivalent to 1/2 were easier to
conceptualize. Moreover, children as young as 3 and 4 years old already have a good
representation of the half boundary (Singer-Freeman and Goswami, 2001). As children are
frequently exposed to 1/2 quite early in life, the familiarity of that quantity might induce a
different type of mental representations compared to other less familiar fractions. Pupils might
benefit from lessons including a larger pool of fractions. Teaching programs mostly insist on
quantities that can be divided by 2. This limited vision of fractions seems to generate
difficulties when it comes to generalization. Teachers could diversify the number of fractions
used during lessons.

Improper fractions represented another major difficulty for primary school children (Bright et
al., 1988; Tzur, 1999). The main difficulty appeared in the test when pupils were asked to
graphically represent an improper fraction or when an improper fraction was presented in an
ordering task. When pupils were asked to order 1 in a sequence involving fractions, the most
common error was to put it at the end of the sequence, even if there was an improper fraction.
This could mean that some children cannot imagine fractions can be larger than 1. This is
consistent with the results found by Kallai and Tzelgov (2009) who showed that adults have a
mental representation of what they called a generalized fraction. A generalized fraction
corresponds to an entity smaller than one emerging from the common notation of fraction
(Kallai and Tzelgov, 2009).












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