Children's performance on a mathematics task they were not taught to solve: A case study

International audienceA teacher documents how a task was used to elicit children's knowledge of multiplication as a precursor to learning the long multiplication algorithm. Data include samples of children's written work, and transcripts of two 30-minute lessons. Children discussed solution strategies. The teacher used time between the two lessons to select and sequence representative strategies to share. Strategies used by the children were diverse showing a range of multiplication-related knowledge among the children ranging from knowledge of repeated addition to knowledge of place value and the additive decomposition of numbers to various applications of the distributive property