To better understand the role that ways of reasoning play in students' success on integer addition and subtraction problems, we examined the relationship between students' flexible use of ways of reasoning and their performance on integers open number sentences. Within groups of students in 3 participant groups--39 2nd and 4th graders who had…

Developmental changes in 5- to 7-year-old children's mental representation of addition and subtraction events were examined by means of the response times required to answer more or less questions. (Author/JMB)

Two experiments examined developmental changes in reasoning about intensive quantities--predicting mixture intensity of pairs of liquids with different intensities of red color. Results showed that cognitive averaging in this domain developed late and slowly. Predominating up to 12 years was an extensivity bias, a strong tendency to use rules that…

This paper reports the results of the second of a series of collaborative studies examining how children acquire the skills to represent and solve verbal addition and subtraction problems. The purpose of this study was to identify the cognitive processing capabilities of a group of Tasmanian (Australian) children. Fifteen cognitive tests were…

Validated models of mental addition processing by testing children and adults in a production task paradigm. Examined individual-difference relations between strategy choice parameters and criterion-related measures of ability. Found that individual differences in the apparently calculative processes that underlie numerical facility are highly…

Children and adults were tested on six speeded perceptual-motor and cognitive tasks, including a (1) response time task; (2) button tapping task; (3) pegboard task; (4) coding task; (5) picture matching task; and (6) mental addition task. Age-related change in processing time on most of these tasks was described by a single exponential function.…

The purpose of this study was to identify the working memory capacity (M-space) for a group of 139 children (4 to 8 years of age) enrolled at Sandy Bay Infant School in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. Four M-space tests -- The Counting Span Test (Case and Kurland, 1978), Mr. Cucui Test (DeAvila and Havassy, 1974), the Digit Placement Test (Case,…