El desarrollo de las estrategias infantiles. Un estudio sobre el razonamiento aditivo y multiplicativo

Title: The development of children's strategies. A study of the additive and multiplicative reasoning. Abstract: Young children posses a wide range of arithmetical abilities that enable them to successfully face word problem, with additive and multipli- cative structures. To test this, we have assessed the participants twice (i.e., when they were 4 to 5 years old and when they were 5 to 6 years old) with Change and Equal Groups problems, where objects were available to ease the representation of the quantities of the problems. The result showed that: (1) the level of children's success was very high, regardless the mo- ment of assessment and the kind of problem; (2) only the subtraction problems registered a decrease during the second assessment; (3) the procedures of resolution were mainly based on the direct representation of the quantities for all kind of problems; (4) the counting strategies were used only in the additive and subtractive problems, while the derived fact strategies were mainly applied in the multiplication and division problems; (5) the variability in the use of the strategies was affected by the kind of operation involved in the problem and the moment of the assessment; and finally (6) strategy change seemed to be gradual rather than abrupt.