Many students are afraid and unable to work with fractions. The topics of fractions in recent year school textbooks are scattered throughout several grade levels, which might affect on students understanding and learning, because it breaks down the interconnections of the knowledge. This book, Understanding Fractions, provides all fundamental concepts and operations of fractions as an integrated whole. This book makes fraction easy to understand and learn. Many sections have pictures or diagrams and/or real life examples to demonstrate or emphasize meanings of concepts and/or operations. And each example shows the detailed steps, which may not be shown in other books. The teaching principle of this book is to have students understanding factions meaningfully. Anyone who can read and has desire to learn fractions can learn fractions from this book. In our high-tech era, the ability of doing fractions is one must-have to succeed in many science and high-tech fields. Students able to do fractions have higher probability of passing Calculus or Business Calculus----college math. Thus, learning fractions is in demand from elementary school level to higher education level. From math education respect, all elementary, middle and high school teachers can use this book as teachers' resource book to prepare lesson plans for teaching fractions. This book provides many examples and exercises ready to use, and, more importantly, the logics of teaching concepts are interwoven through the book.
About the Author: Dr. Yu-Shattuck did her undergraduate work in China, and she received her master degree of mathematics in Eastern New Mexico University, and her PhD of math education in New Mexico State University. She is an associate professor of mathematics at El Paso Community College. She has been teaching in the U.S.A. for almost two decades in a high school, colleges and universities, and taught in China for 10 years in elementary school, middle school and adult education. Her research specialty is quantitative research. Her quantitative research on the indicators prediction of problem solving success with statistical Path Analysis, other than her dissertation, has published on the Official Journal of The Research Council on Mathematics Learning. In 1994, she had introduced "Chinese Factoring" of trinomials to American teachers and published on the Journal of Mathematics Teachers of National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. She has done other quantitative researches about the factors that affect student success. She is married and lives with her husband.