Specificity of children’s arithmetic learning

• Published in: Journal of experimental child psychology 2014-06, Vol.122, p.62-74
• Main Authors: Walker, Drew, Bajic, Daniel, Mickes, Laura, Kwak, Jung, Rickard, Timothy C.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Age Factors; Arithmetic; Biological and medical sciences; Child; Child development; Child psychology; Developmental psychology; Educational Measurement; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Generalization (Psychology); Humans; Identical elements model; Learning; Mathematics; Mathematics - education; Memory; Problem Solving; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Transfer; Transfer (Psychology)
• ISSN: 0022-0965; 1096-0457
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2013.11.018

•The specificity of children’s arithmetic learning was explored.•Learning transferred neither to untrained problems nor operation complements.•The results held for 6- through 11-year-old children and for all four operations.•These results mirror the specificity of learning that have been observed for adults.•Education implications for arithmetic training are noted. Among adults, arithmetic training–transfer studies have documented a high degree of learning specificity. Provided that there is a delay of at least 1day between training and testing, performance gains do not transfer to untrained problems, nor do they transfer to complement operation-inverted problems (e.g., gains for 4+7=__ do not transfer to the complement subtraction problem, 11−4=__, or vice versa). Here we demonstrate the same degree of learning specificity among 6- to 11-year-old children. These results appear to rule out, for the current training paradigm, operation-level procedural learning as well as any variant of complement problem mediation that would predict transfer. Results are consistent with either or both of two types of learning: (a) item-level procedural learning and (b) a shift to memory-based performance as predicted by the elemental elements model. These results suggest a developmental pattern such that specificity of learning among children is similar to that among adults. Educational implications are noted.