Sharing scenarios facilitate division performance in preschoolers

Abstract

Understanding division is critical for later mathematical achievement. Yet division concepts are difficult to grasp and are often not explicitly taught until middle childhood. Given the structural similarity between sharing and division, we investigated whether contextualizing division problems as sharing scenarios improved preschool-aged children’s abilities to solve them, as compared with other arithmetic problems which do not share structural similarities with sharing. Preschoolers (N = 113) completed an addition, subtraction, and division problem in either a sharing context that presented arithmetic via contextualized sharing scenarios, or a comparable, linguistically-matched non-social context (randomly assigned). Children were assessed on their formal, verbal responses and their informal, non-verbal, action-based responses (abilities to solve the problems using manipulatives) to these arithmetic problems. Most critically, context predicted children’s performance on the division, but not the addition or subtraction trial, supporting a structural link between sharing and division. Results also revealed that children’s action-based responses to the arithmetic problems were much more accurate than their verbal ones. Results are discussed in terms of the conceptual link between division and sharing.