While previous studies mainly focused on children's additive and multiplicative reasoning abilities, we studied third to sixth graders' "preference" for additive or multiplicative relations. This was investigated by means of schematic problems that were "open" to both types of relations, namely arrow schemes containing three…

Background: Rational numbers are of critical importance both in mathematics and in other fields of science. However, they form a stumbling block for learners. One widely known source of the difficulty learners have with rational numbers is the natural number bias, that is the tendency to (inappropriately) apply natural number properties in…

In contrast to previous studies on Spontaneous Focusing on Quantitative Relations (SFOR), the present study investigated not only the "extent" to which children focus on (multiplicative) quantitative relations, but also the "nature" of children's quantitative focus (i.e., the types of quantitative relations that children focus…