Examining Problem-Solving Schemas and Schema Features in Children’s Trade Books

Teachers and caregivers use children’s books (i.e., trade books) to support mathematics learning in school and home settings; shared book reading offers a unique opportunity to support students’ understanding of operations and schema development. No prior studies have examined the representations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division schemas in trade books. We coded 88 children’s books for additive and multiplicative schemas, the position of the unknown information, and features included in the problem-solving scenarios (e.g., single-step vs. multistep). Of the additive schemas, books most often represented join and separate schemas with an unknown end amount. With multiplicative schemas, the equal groups schema was most often represented. We discuss practical implications for using trade books to support schema development and problem-solving competency, and we provide suggestions for authors to better represent a range of schemas and text features to support students’ mathematics understanding with more difficult schema concepts during shared reading.