Never getting to zero: Elementary school students' understanding of the infinite divisibility of number and matter

Clinical interviews administered to third- to sixth-graders explored children's conceptualizations of rational number and of certain extensive physical quantities. We found within child consistency in reasoning about diverse aspects of rational number. Children's spontaneous acknowledgement of the existence of numbers between 0 and 1 was strongly related to their induction that numbers are infinitely divisible in the sense that they can be repeatedly divided without ever getting to zero. Their conceptualizing number as infinitely divisible was strongly related to their having a model of fraction notation based on division and to their successful judgment of the relative magnitudes of fractions and decimals. In addition, their understanding number as infinitely divisible was strongly related to their understanding physical quantities as infinitely divisible. These results support a conceptual change account of knowledge acquisition, involving two-way mappings between the domains of number and physical quantity.