Examines strategies used by preschool children to subdivide items and focuses on how counting and sharing relate to one another. Indicates that children exhibited alternative strategies--suggesting use of a recipient as a mental cycle-marker and an adjacent recipient strategy--with pauses between allocations suggesting a re-presentation of lots…

This article proposes a taxonomy of strategies for single-digit multiplication, then uses it to elucidate the nature of the learning tasks involved in multiplication. In preceding work, it has generally been assumed that much of children's strategy development is driven by changes in their general conceptual capabilities relating to number. In…

Investigates possibilities for and manifestations of collaborative work with pairs of kindergarten students as they worked on tasks designed to promote early number development. Students generated four strategies, and three themes emerged from the analysis of the cooperative solutions. Contains 34 references. (Author/ASK)

Devises a new curriculum to introduce rational numbers by using developmental theory as a guide. Experiment concluded that students in the treatment group showed a deeper understanding of rational numbers than those in the control group, showed less reliance on whole-number strategies when solving novel problems, and made more frequent references…

Researchers from four projects with a problem-solving approach to teaching and learning multidigit number concepts and operations describe a common framework of conceptual structures children construct for multidigit numbers, and categories of methods children devise for multidigit addition and subtraction. Conceptions include unitary, decade and…

Presents a three-year longitudinal study investigating the development of children's (n=82) understanding of multidigit number concepts and operations in grades one through three by using interview processes. Provides an existence proof that children can invent strategies for adding and subtracting and illustrates both what that invention affords…

Examined the effects of intervention in the instruction of 12 male seventh-grade students for the purpose of developing number sense. Results indicate that after instruction students were more likely to use strategies to solve number magnitude, mental computation, and computational estimation problems that reflected number sense. (Contains 50…