Memorizing the multiplication table is a major challenge for elementary school students: there are many facts to memorize, and they are often similar to each other, which creates interference in memory. Here, we examined whether learning would improve if the degree of interference is reduced, and which memory processes are responsible for this…

Three experiments examined whether children, like adults, can surpress interference effects when retrieving from long-term memory to solve arithmetic problems. Found that the associations between a number pair and its sum or product are of sufficient strength during the elementary school years to produce interference effects, depending on the age…

The author's secondary school mathematics students have often reported to her that quadratic relations are one of the most conceptually challenging aspects of the high school curriculum. From her own classroom experiences there seemed to be several aspects to the students' challenges. Many students, even in their early secondary education, have…

In one experiment, subjects from third grade through college relied on memory retrieval rather than on counting to solve multiplication problems. An effect of confusing problems on error rates and reaction times indicated the activation of related information. In a second experiment, subjects demonstrated automaticity of fact retrieval on simple…

This report describes a simulation of adults' retrieval of arithmetic facts from a network-based memory representation. The goals of the simulation project are to: demonstrate in specific form the nature of a spreading activation model of mental arithmetic; account for three important reaction time effects observed in laboratory investigations;…

Results of a comparison of 73 Anglo American and 155 Chinese American (CA) fourth through sixth graders on an intelligence test and measures of the speed and consistency of retrieval of arithmetic facts from long-term memory are consistent with the hypothesis that accessing elementary arithmetic knowledge is more completely automatized in CA…