Teaching children to add and subtract

Abstract

At a 1980 conference, leading mathematics educators synthesized previous knowledge on children's early understanding of addition and subtraction and proposed central parameters for future research in these areas form a cognitive science perspective. We have, since 1980, increased our knowledge about how children learn to add and subtract, but we need to know more about the best ways for teachers to guide children as they construct knowledge of addition and subtraction. In this article, we review several studies that focus on an enhanced role for teachers in enabling children to learn addition and subtraction. These studies describe efforts that have been made to teach children to use diagrams and mediational representations, number sentences, or algorithms and procedures. The studies report improvement in children's problem-solving performance, but the impact of the efforts described on children's conceptual understanding is less clear. Thus, we analyze this research, pose questions on the relationship of instruction to children's knowledge construction, and propose a research agenda that we believe will enable us to understand how teaching can best help children learn to add and subtract.