Abstract
Studies of children’s and adolescents’ conceptual understanding of division at the secondary school level show widespread problems in associating meanings (actions of either sharing or measuring and related everyday situations) with division terms (symbolic level) at all. When children manage to make such connections, they tend to interpret division in terms of sharing, while interpretations in measuring are relatively rare. At the primary level, it seems to be the other way around: When first introduced to division, many children find the quotative interpretation easier than the partitive one. The paper reports on a small longitudinal study of the development of 11 children’s mental models of division from second to fourth grade. The study provides evidence that the children’s instruction failed to link actions using the material, which the children preferred to perform by measurement, to viable prototypes of everyday situations. Implications for teaching are discussed.