Proportion: Learning Proportional Reasoning Together

Abstract

Proportional reasoning is a broadly applicable skill that is fundamental to mathematical understanding.While the cognitive devel- opment of proportional reasoning is well understood, traditional learning methods are often ineffective. They provide neither real-time feedback nor sophisticated tools to scaffold learning. Learners often cannot connect embodied notions (this glass is half full) to their symbolic representations ( 1/2 ). In this paper, we introduce Proportion—a tablet applications for two co-located learners to work together to solve a series of increasingly difficult ratio / proportion problems. We motivate the work in previ- ous research on proportional reasoning, detail the design and outline the questions this design-based research aims to address.