Young Students' Concepts of Turning and Angle

Thirty-six students from Grades 2, 4, and 6 were each presented with realistic models of 4 familiar turning situations (an oven temperature knob, a door, a doll turning about an axis, and a car turning around bends in a road) and were questioned about the relation of the situations to each other and to various abstract angle models. The responses suggest that young students have separate concepts of turning and bending: Turning (knob, doll, and door) is a movement, whereas bending (road bends) is a configuration. Many young students do not spontaneously interpret turning as a configuration or bending as a movement. Implications for the teaching of angle concepts are explored.