Supporting One: Supporting Children’s Unit Understanding

This lecture explores how learning environments and instructional approaches might support the development of robust unit understanding in children. The lecture will describe what is known about how environmental factors, such as visual representations and narrative, may play a role in children’s interpretation of “oneness” and in coordinating groups of discrete elements into structured, countable units. Promising early evidence will be presented on how to support children’s learning of embedded units in base-ten through instruction that explicitly foregrounds unit structure and supports analogical mapping across representations. Implications for curriculum design and classroom practice will be addressed.