This study investigates the use of manipulatives by elementary students working on a fraction task. Extending previous work on the role played by the manipulatives in students' activity, we aim at describing how the choices made for the task design disrupt students' activity, creating opportunities to learn. The theoretical underpinnings allow…

In this study, we investigated if children build a print-to-meaning connection via the semantic radical -- a mechanism we call "semantic decoding" -- and its interaction with phonological decoding in orthographic learning of Chinese compound characters. Ninety-two Grade 4 children were taught the pronunciations and meanings of 16…