Familiariser avec les nombres fractionnaires: ressources et obstacles

The results of teaching the fractions are not generally satisfactory. Among the many obstacles there are: the complex structure of the concept of rational number; the uniqueness of the "action scheme" that underlays teaching and learning fractions in classroom practice; the "bias" of the whole number. The three points that characterize proposal that we are experiencing in the third year of primary school, are the following ones: the universe of fractional numbers is a new universe, different from the universe of natural numbers already well-known to children; the comparison between two homogeneous quantities gives rise to an elementary and fundamental process of mathematization; the measure, defined as the comparison between quantity and whole, is an ordered pair of numbers that shows how many times the quantity and the whole contain the common unit respectively.