Abstract Recent research has shown that most elementary school children under 10 fail to use a shortcut strategy to solve inversion problems such as “a + b − b”, but solve them in the same way they solve problems such as “a + b − c” ( Bisanz & LeFevre, 1990 ). There is no reason to believe that children older than 8 years lack the necessary conceptual knowledge for discovering the shortcut strategy. This study addresses the question of whether children in fact are already able to discover the shortcut strategy but do not use it because they prefer to use more familiar computing strategies. By providing supporting conditions and sufficient practice it was asked whether children will discover and use the shortcut strategy. In a first phase, half of the children ( n = 44) were presented one block of a + b − c problems and one block of a + b − b problems (Supporting Condition), whereas for the other half ( n = 44) the problems were randomly mixed (Control Condition). In a second phase, all subjects were presented a + b − b problems and a + b − c problems in a mixed order. In this phase, there were significantly more shortcut strategy users under the Supporting Condition than under the Control Condition. The results showed that most of the children younger than 10 are able to use the shortcut strategy, but only do so when it does not have to compete with a more familiar strategy.
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