Children's Use of Arithmetic Shortcuts: The Role of Attitudes in Strategy Choice

Current models of strategy choice do not account for children's attitudes towards different problem solving strategies. Grade 2, 3, and 4 students solved three sets of three-term addition problems. On inversion problems (e.g., 4 + 8 − 8), if children understand the inverse relation between the operations, no calculations are required. On associativity problems (e.g., 5 + 27 − 23), if children understand the associative relation between the operations, problem solving can be facilitated by performing subtraction before addition. A brief intervention involving demonstrations of different problem solving strategies followed the first problem set. Shortcut use increased after the intervention, particularly for students who preferred shortcuts to the left-to-right algorithm. In the third set, children were given transfer problems (e.g., 8 + 4 − 8, 4 − 8 + 8, 27 + 5 − 23). Shortcut use was similar to first set suggesting that transfer did occur. That shortcut use increased the most for students who had positive attitudes about the shortcuts suggests that attitudes have important implications for subsequent arithmetic performance.