Although almost everyone agrees that the environment shapes children's learning, surprisingly few studies assess in detail the specific environments that shape children's learning of specific content. The present article briefly reviews examples of how such environmental assessments have improved understanding of child development in diverse areas, and examines in depth the contributions of analyses of one type of environment to one type of learning: how biased distributions of problems in mathematics textbooks influence children's learning of fraction arithmetic. We find extensive parallels between types of problems that are rarely presented in US textbooks and problems where children in the US encounter greater difficulty than might be expected from the apparent difficulty of the procedures involved. We also consider how some children master fraction arithmetic despite also learning the textbook distributions. Finally, we present findings from a recent intervention that indicates how children's fraction learning can be improved.

中文翻译：

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理解发展需要评估相关环境：数学学习的例子

尽管几乎所有人都同意环境影响儿童的学习，但令人惊讶的是，很少有研究详细评估影响儿童学习特定内容的特定环境。本文简要回顾了此类环境评估如何提高对不同领域儿童发展理解的示例，并深入研究了分析一种环境对一种学习的贡献：数学教科书中问题的偏向分布如何影响儿童的学习。学习分数运算。我们发现美国教科书中很少出现的问题类型与美国儿童遇到的困难比所涉及程序的明显困难所预期的更大的问题之间存在广泛的相似之处。我们还考虑了一些孩子在学习教科书分布的情况下如何掌握分数算术。最后，我们展示了最近一项干预的结果，表明如何改善儿童的分数学习。