WHY JOHNNY STILL CAN'T ADD: PREDICTORS OF UNIVERSITY STUDENTS' PERFORMANCE ON AN ELEMENTARY ARITHMETIC TEST
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Undergraduates ( N = 75) at a liberal arts college were given the D'Amore Test (DT; Hume, 1932), a measure of elementary arithmetic skills which uses 10 simple items taken directly from a third-grade curriculum of 1932. Unlimited time and written rough work were allowed. Exactly two-thirds of the subjects failed the DT by achieving a score below 10. On average, 8.71 items were answered correctly (range 5–10), and 63% of subjects scored between 5 and 8 inclusive. DT scores decreased progressively with the number of years the subject had spent at university, and varied by area of study, with Business Administration students scoring the lowest. Performance was correlated positively with self-rated math ability and self-predicted DT score, and negatively with math anxiety. It was not associated with gender, age, grades, or home province; nor with liking for math, science, computers or high-school math teaching. The hardest test item, with a 32% error rate, was to evaluate 92 × 34.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".