Measure for Measure: What Combining Diverse Measures Reveals About Children's Understanding of the Equal Sign as an Indicator of Mathematical Equality

Knowledge of the equal sign as an indicator of mathematical equality is foundational to children's mathematical development and serves as a key link between arithmetic and algebra. This study extended prior efforts to use a construct modeling approach to unify diverse measures into a single assessment designed to measure knowledge of the equal sign. Children in Grades 2-6 (N = 224) completed the assessment. The current findings reaffirmed a past finding that diverse items can be integrated onto a single scale, revealed the wide variability in children's knowledge of the equal sign assessed by different types of items, and provided empirical evidence for a link between equal-sign knowledge and success on some basic algebra items.