Students' understanding of the meaning of the equal sign develops slowly over the primary grades. In addition to updating their representations of equations to recognize that the equal sign represents an equivalence relation rather than signaling an operation, students need to move beyond full computation to efficiently solve equivalence problems.…

Urban and rural children have different levels of performance in arithmetic processing. This study investigated whether such a residence difference can be explained by phonological processing. A total of 1,501 Chinese primary school students from urban and rural areas were recruited to complete nine cognitive tasks: two in arithmetic performance…

Learning to solve arithmetic word problems is an essential part of the primary school mathematics curriculum. The success of word-problem solving was previously found to relate to reading comprehension ability of children. However, the relationships between specific reading comprehension component skills and word-problem solving remain largely…