Materials count: Linear-spatial materials improve young children's addition strategies and accuracy, irregular arrays don't.

ABSTRACT: Children who use advanced arithmetic strategies, such as count-on and decomposition, are more accurate when solving arithmetic problems and are more likely to later have higher levels of math achievement. The present study tested the hypothesis that instruction using linear-spatial representations would activate children's knowledge necessary for use of mental addition strategies and, thus, lead to greater accuracy on addition problems, than instruction using irregular representations of magnitude. As predicted, low-income kindergartners (n = 29) randomly assigned to practice sums up to 10 using materials that instantiated the linear-spatial features of a mental number line (i.e., discrete squares arranged in rows) demonstrated substantially more improvement in solving unpracticed addition

SUBMITTER: Schiffman J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6312299 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature