Ten-year-old children strategies in mental addition : a counting model account

Details

Serval ID
serval:BIB_50DA7ED881B8
Type
Article: article from journal or magazin.
Collection
Publications
Title
Ten-year-old children strategies in mental addition : a counting model account
Journal
Cognition
Author(s)
Thevenot C., Barrouillet P., Castel C., Uittenhove K.
ISSN-L
1873-7838
Publication state
Published
Issued date
01/2016
Volume
146
Pages
48-57
Language
english
Abstract
For more than 30years, it has been admitted that individuals from the age of 10 mainly retrieve the answer of simple additions from long-term memory, at least when the sum does not exceed 10. Nevertheless, recent studies challenge this assumption and suggest that expert adults use fast, compacted and unconscious procedures in order to solve very simple problems such as 3+2. If this is true, automated procedures should be rooted in earlier strategies and therefore observable in their non-compacted form in children. Thus, contrary to the dominant theoretical position, children's behaviors should not reflect retrieval. This is precisely what we observed in analyzing the responses times of a sample of 42 10-year-old children who solved additions with operands from 1 to 9. Our results converge towards the conclusion that 10-year-old children still use counting procedures in order to solve non-tie problems involving operands from 2 to 4. Moreover, these counting procedures are revealed whatever the expertise of children, who differ only in their speed of execution. Therefore and contrary to the dominant position in the literature according to which children's strategies evolve from counting to retrieval, the key change in development of mental addition solving appears to be a shift from slow to quick counting procedures.
Keywords
learning process, mathematical cognition, mental arithmetic, numerical cognition
Pubmed
Create date
05/11/2015 11:11
Last modification date
17/01/2022 16:59
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