This article presents a study that compared the success rates of students in Arithmetic (MTH 02), Algebra I (MTH 03), and Algebra II (MTH 03) when they were offered at Southwest Virginia Community College (SWCC) for three credits versus five credits. The authors' findings showed no significant differences in the success rates of students who were…

Developmental dyscalculia (DD) is a pervasive difficulty affecting number processing and arithmetic. It is encountered in around 6% of school-aged children. While previous studies have mainly focused on general cognitive functions, the present paper aims to further investigate the hypothesis of a specific numerical deficit in dyscalculia. The…

In traditional mathematics education, students have typically been asked to solve lots of tedious and uninteresting exercises for developing the arithmetic skills of addition and subtraction. The paper provides an account of learning arithmetic skills in a more interesting way through the collaborative playing of a puzzle game. 83 students in…

Children diagnosed with cerebral palsy (CP) often show difficulties in arithmetic compared to their typically developing peers. The present study explores whether cognitive and motor variables are related to arithmetic performance of a large group of primary school children with CP. More specifically, the relative influence of non-verbal…

This paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of the concepts of a "reversible process" and "entropy". For this purpose, an adiabatic irreversible expansion or compression is analysed, by considering that an ideal gas is expanded (compressed), from an initial pressure P[subscript i] to a final pressure P[subscript f], by being placed in…

Recent studies on nonsymbolic arithmetic have illustrated that under conditions that prevent exact calculation, adults display a systematic tendency to overestimate the answers to addition problems and underestimate the answers to subtraction problems. It has been suggested that this "operational momentum" results from exposure to a…

Adult and developing humans share with other animals analog magnitude representations of number that support nonsymbolic arithmetic with large sets. This experiment tested the hypothesis that such representations may be more accurate for addition than for subtraction in children as young as 3 1/2 years of age. In these tasks, the experimenter hid…

There is a very natural way to divide a four-digit number into 2 two-digit numbers. Applying an algorithm to this pair of numbers, determine how often the original four-digit number reappears. (Contains 3 tables.)

A simple view, which dates back to Turing, proposes that complex cognitive operations are composed of serially arranged elementary operations, each passing intermediate results to the next. However, whether and how such serial processing is achieved with a brain composed of massively parallel processors, remains an open question. Here, we study…

The author clarifies his position regarding what features of the examples used by Kaminski, Sloutsky, and Heckler (2008a) constitute substantive differences affecting performance. I also reiterate my hesitancy to extrapolate their findings to the broader realm of mathematics.

The identification of patterned responding in unmotivated test takers was investigated through the formation of a novel method. The proposed method relied on marginal proportions of answer choice options as well as the transitional proportions between responses on item pairs. A chi square analysis was used to determine the degree of significance…

In the September 2010 issue of "Mathematics Teaching," Tom O'Brien offered practical advice about how to teach addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division and contrasted his point of view with that of H.H. Wu. In this article, the author revisits Tom's examples, drawing on his methodology while, hopefully, simplifying it and giving it…

Depending on task combination, dual-tasking can either be performed successfully or can lead to performance decrements in one or both tasks. Interference is believed to be caused by limitations in central processing, i.e. structural interference between the neural activation patterns associated with each task. In the present study, single- and…

This article discusses how 13-year-old students with above-average numeracy skills and below-average reading skills cope with comprehending word problems. Compared to other students who are proficient in numeracy and are skilled readers, these students are more disadvantaged when solving single-step and multistep arithmetic word problems. The…

We examined the effects of early life stress (ELS) on intellectual ability in 2,725 20-year-old male participants, of whom 321 were separated temporarily (mean 1.7 years) from both their parents during World War II, at an average age of 4.3 years. Intellectual ability was tested when entering compulsory military service. The separated men had…