The multiplicative meaning conveyed by visual representations

Research and practitioner articles advocate the use of visual representations in scaffolding elementary students’ learning of multiplication and division. Prior research suggests students use different strategies when provided with different visualized representations of multiplication and division. However, there is relatively little study examining how children’s multiplicative reasoning corresponds with different representations. The present study collected data from 182 elementary students responding to set, area, and length representations of multiplication/division. Rasch modeling was used to estimate item difficulty statistics to measure differences between visual representations. Results suggest that visual representations differed primarily in how unit was represented and quantified, and not regarding the form of representation (set, area, length).