Children's Use of Arithmetic Shortcuts: The Role of Attitudes in Strategy Choice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.000 | 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".