THE DEVELOPMENT OF CHILDRENS MENTAL MULTIPLICATION SKILLS

Simple multiplication skills of subjects from third grade through college were studied. Data from Experiment 1 indicated that to solve simple multiplication problems, even third graders rely heavily on memory retrieval rather than on reconstructive procedures such as counting. Reaction time was predicted better by normative measures of problem difficulty or strength at all ages than by structural variables associated with the problems (e.g., size of multipliers). Furthermore, confusion problems, those with an incorrect answer that is multiplicatively related to the problem (e.g., 4 × 8 = 24), affected error rates beginning with fifth grade and reaction times beginning with seventh grade; by late elementary school, then, retrieval involves automatic activation of related information. In Experiment 2, subjects in all grades demonstrated automaticity of fact retrieval on simple problems, although children under seventh grade did not demonstrate automatic facilitation on more difficult problems. The data are consistent with the position that arithmetic processing in simple multiplication is at least partially automatic, even by the third grade, and with current models based on network or associative knowledge structures in long-term memory. © 1991.