Place value is a challenging concept in children’s developing understanding of number. In this study we examine how first-grade children’s developing understanding interacts with representations of place value in a virtual game. We examined the comments and strategies children produced during the game, particularly attending to those that exhibited emerging knowledge about base-10 structure. Both behaviors were then examined in relation to children’s performance on a grade-specific pre- and posttest. Not surprisingly, children who made comments about tens during the game showed greater pre-to-posttest gains than those who did not. Less expectedly, children whose strategies relied exclusively on counting, but were prone to errors, showed gains in performance when compared to accurate counters. Implications are discussed in terms of the affordances of virtual manipulatives, especially when learners lack some necessary skills to succeed.

在儿童对数字的理解中，地方价值是一个具有挑战性的概念。在这项研究中，我们研究了一年级儿童不断发展的理解如何与虚拟游戏中的位置价值表示相互作用。我们检查了孩子在游戏中产生的评论和策略，特别是那些表现出对10进制结构新兴知识的孩子的评论和策略。然后，在特定年级的测试前和测试后，对这两种行为与孩子的表现进行了比较。毫不奇怪，在游戏中发表数十条评论的孩子比未发表评论的孩子表现出更大的测验前测验收益。出乎意料的是，儿童的策略仅依赖于计数，但是容易出错，与精确计数器相比，其性能有所提高。本文以虚拟操作的能力来讨论其含义，特别是当学习者缺乏一些成功的必要技能时。