Working memory and children’s use of retrieval to solve addition problems

Strategies in subtraction problem solving in children

“…Of course, one could expect less frequent retrievals in subtractions than in additions, for example, because the former operations have been practiced less frequently by children. Nonetheless, the difference should be more quantitative than qualitative, and the distribution of retrieval frequencies among the subtraction problems should reflect what Barrouillet and Lépine (2005) observed for the corresponding additions. In the same way, the processes underpinning the learning of subtractive facts and their retrieval should be the same and, therefore, should be affected by the same individual capacities.…”

“…To shed light on this problem, we explored subtraction solving in children and compared their strategy use with that observed in children of the same age when solving the corresponding additions (e.g., the subtraction corresponding to 8 + 4 = 12 is 12 À 8 = 4). For this purpose, we used the material and results described in the study by Barrouillet and Lépine (2005), who presented third graders with the entire set of basic additions involving operands from 1 to 9. As we noted above, Dehaene's and Siegler's accounts of subtraction lead to opposite predictions.…”

“…The predictions issuing from these models were tested by presenting children with the inverse of the 81 basic addition facts (augend and addend from 1 to 9) studied by Barrouillet and Lépine (2005), with the sum standing for the minuend, the augend standing for the subtrahend, and the addend becoming the remainder; for example, the addition 6 + 3 = 9 corresponds to 9 À 6 = 3 with 9 as the minuend, 6 as the subtrahend, and 3 as the remainder. Because there was no difference in strategy use between third and fourth graders in Barrouillet and Lépine's study, the current study focused on third graders only.…”

“…Apart from the strategy used, the speed and nature of the response were also recorded. The working memory capacities of the children were assessed using the same working memory span tasks as in Barrouillet and Lépine (2005), the counting span task inspired by Case, Kurland, and Goldberg (1982), and the reading letter span task (Lépine, Barrouillet, & Camos, 2005;Lépine, Bernardin, & Barrouillet, 2005).…”

“…However, so far as we know, no study has systematically compared the strategies used by children to solve the two operations and, more precisely, the extent to which children rely on direct retrieval. The current study fills this gap by exploring the strategies used by children to solve the 81 basic subtractions that are the inverses of the one-digit additions (operands form 1 to 9) recently studied by Barrouillet and Lépine (2005).…”