Error patterns and subtraction knowledge development

Many errors in arithmetical computation are not random or careless; they are learned and have become habitual, and often reveal little about the student’s conceptual understanding of the computational principle. There is a need to assist students who exhibit habitual computational errors, as errors reflect the student’s lack of meaningful understanding of the computational procedure. The success, however, of corrective instruction is affected by many factors. These include the educator’s expertise, the student’s prior experiences with learning failure, the student’s response to corrective instruction, the nature of the learning difficulty, the accuracy of the error diagnosis, the relationship between the student and the educator, and primarily, the degree of transfer of learning from the corrective setting to the regular classroom