A strong foundation in early number concepts is critical for students’ future success in mathematics. Research suggests that visual representations, like a number line, support students’ development of number sense by helping them create a mental representation of the order and magnitude of numbers. In addition, explicitly sequencing instruction to transition from concrete to visual to abstract representations of mathematics concepts supports students’ conceptual understanding. This column describes and illustrates how teachers can use number lines and features of explicit and systematic instruction to support students’ early development of number sense.
Much of the literature on reading development focuses on measures of early literacy skills (e.g., phonological awareness, phonics, fluency). Elementary educators interested in improving students’ skills in these areas can draw on a wealth of research studies. However, many studies of early literacy skills have not addressed comprehension, obviously an important feature of literacy. The authors used a one-parameter Rasch model to examine the relative difficulty of different multiple-choice reading comprehension items assessing students’ literal, inferential, and evaluative comprehension of fictional narratives. They also examined the difficulty of questions derived from concepts identified by state content standards as important components of reading comprehension, such as character, prediction, and plot sequence. The findings suggest a curvilinear relationship between literal, inferential, and evaluative comprehension, with literal comprehension being the easiest and inferential and evaluative comprehension more challenging. The findings also indicate that assessment objectives differ on the basis of difficulty. Implications of these findings for practice are discussed.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.