The Investigation Of The Length Measurement Ability Development Of Children In Large Classes

Length measurement ability is a important concept of mathematical cognitive ability. The purpose of the study was to investigate the development of length measurement ability and understand their characterize of length measurement ability in operant activity. The measurement for children’s length measurement ability were adapted from the studies of Shi and Zhang. A sample of51children aged5-6was randomly selected from2top classes in one preschools from Tianjin. Through the two methods of quantitative research and qualitative research on the characteristics of length measurement ability.The study examined the state of development of their length measurement ability in different dimension. We concluded the main results as follows:1·In the development level, there are different in direct comparison, indirect comparison, the measurement of an object and object measurement problems; direct comparison of development level is higher;2·In direct comparison, most of children aged5-6can used strategies of visual and side by side comparison;3·Indirect comparison can divided into two aspects, nonstandard and standard of measurement. In terms of nonstandard measurement, children can make good use of nonstandard measuring tool, and according to the result compare objects; but in the use of standard measuring tool, most of children can’t clearly understand the relationship between results and the length of objects;4·In the measurement of an object, most of children tend to choose standard measurement tools, but were not able to use the standard; in the opposite, children made fewer mistakes in nonstandard measurement, in spite of this, amostly of children can’t clearly pointed out the mistakes in the nonstandard strategy.5·Although children can realized to use a simple way to solve the problem of measurement, such as direct comparison, but most of the children also just think of a direct comparison, can not apply other method to solve the problem, and the units of length measurement of transitivity and no clear understanding.Based on the results, we proposed several suggestions for the improvement of teaching.