ABSTRACT
One of the significant achievements of recent research on children’s mathematical learning has been the construction of detailed maps of their development of informal or intuitive concepts of arithmetic. Children’s informal strategies for adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing have been clearly documented, and remarkably consistent and coherent portraits of their conceptual development of basic whole number operations have emerged (Baroody, 1996; Carpenter, 1985; Carpenter, Ansell, Franke, Fennema, & Weisbeck, 1993; Fuson, 1992; Gutstein & Romberg, 1996; Verschaffel & De Corte, 1993). This research characterizes the development of children’s addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division concepts and skills in terms of the progressive abstraction of their informal strategies, a progression that is both predictable and largely principled.
