Mental Computation Performance and Strategy Use of Japanese Students in Grades 2, 4, 6, and 8.

This study assessed attitude, computational preferences, and mental computational performance of 176, 187, 186, and 206 Japanese students in grades 2, 4, 6, and 8, respectively. A sample of students in grades 4 and 8 scoring in the upper and middle quintiles on the mental computation test was interviewed to identify strategies used to mentally compute. All data were collected during the last month of the school year. A wide range of performance on mental computation was found with respect to all types of numbers (whole numbers, decimals, and fractions) and operations at every grade level; the mode of presentation (visual or oral) significantly affected performance levels, with visual items generally producing higher performance; and the range of strategies (initial and alternative) used to do mental computation was narrow, with the most popular approach reflecting a mental version of a learned "paper/pencil" algorithm.

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