Children building on success: Arithmetical problem solving in the early years

This paper provides evidence of how children can build on their initial successful problem solving approaches in a way that promotes their creative thinking and triggers further learning. The findings come from a project that studied the process of change in 5-6 year old children’s successful problem solving approaches when tacking a multiple-step arithmetic task. Micro-developmental changes in children’s successful strategies were studied by closely observing children’s problem solving behaviour, during a sequence of sessions during which they engaged in solving the same form of addition task more than once, and after they had already been successful. Changes in successful problem solving behaviour were analysed using Karmiloff-Smith’s model of Representational Redescription (RR). The paper presents examples of different types of children’s organisational strategies and shows that children do move beyond success, and do introduce qualitative changes to their successful problem solving strategies