A study about mental calculation strategies with natural numbers in elementary school students using the broken calculator

Abstract

This article reports a study about mental calculation in a group of elementary school students. Mental arithmetic, nowadays, is recognized as a subject of interest by several authors and educational systems. The latter have tried to design programs to develop it according to the flexibility of strategies, mathematical concepts, properties of the number system, and number sense. Several authors point out that tasks or activities should be incorporated with the intention of attending to this priority and not under a memoristic or strict teaching. In this sense, this qualitative research aimed to explore and describe the processes, strategies, operations, and skills (Rathgeb-Schnierer and Green 2019) used by six students studding sixth grade primary school in Puebla, Mexico. These students were 11 years old at the time they used the Broken Calculator application as a milieu to solve tasks; and it is shown that different strategies are developed when faced with the same tasks: some are predominant, others with a simple level of complexity, and how different calculation trains are elaborated according to the mastery of the strategies.

Keywords

• Mental calculation
• Broken calculator
• Flexibility
• Strategy

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