The notion that mental arithmetic is associated with shifts of spatial attention along a spatially organised mental number representation has received empirical support from three lines of research. First, participants tend to overestimate results of addition and underestimate those of subtraction problems in both exact and approximate formats.…

Mathematics anxiety hinders students' mathematical achievement already in primary school, but research on its effects beyond whole number knowledge is limited. The main aim of the current study is to examine how state and trait mathematics anxiety relate to performance across five tasks that are relevant for the development of mathematics in…

Children's knowledge of the ordinal relations among number symbols is related to their mathematical learning. Ordinal knowledge has been measured using judgment (i.e., decide whether a sequence of three digits is in order) and ordering tasks (i.e., order three digits from smallest to largest). However, the question remains whether performance on…

In Asia, some children are taught a calculation technique known as the 'mental abacus'. Previous research indicated that mental abacus experts can perform extraordinary feats of mental arithmetic, but it disagrees as to whether the technique improves working memory. The present study extended and clarified these findings by contrasting performance…

Motivated by a curriculum privileging number-based strategies but national tests highlighting students' reliance on standard algorithms, this study analyses 2,216 Danish Grade 3, 6 and 8 students' solutions to various multidigit arithmetic tasks, each designed to elicit shortcut strategies, against background variables including sex, ethnicity and…

Central elements of adaptive expertise in arithmetic problem solving are flexibility, using multiple strategies, and adaptivity, selecting the optimal strategy. Research shows that the strategies children actually use do not fully reflect the strategies they know: there is hidden potential. In the current study a sample of 147 third graders from…