COGNITIVE STRATEGIES FOR MENTAL CALCULATION

Abstract

We focus on the study of the variety of cognitive strategies, either idiosyncratic or learned, used by students in the first cycle of elementary education in Chile to practice activities of mental calculation. We present an analysis of performance in additive mental calculation tasks (addition and subtraction) of a sample of students from state-subsidized schools in middle and low-middle socioeconomic strata in the cities of Santiago and Valparaiso. We construct a catalogue of the strategies detected and a first version of a software developed by us and available in the internet, which enables us to assess the student's performance, including their response times. We also analyze the correlation between the performance in the proposed tasks (percentage of correct answers and response times) and the average school achievement in mathematics.