Day number routine: an opportunity to understand students’ uses of numbers and operations

• Autor(a) principal: Carvalho, Renata
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Outros Autores: Rodrigues, Margarida
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.21/13508
• topic: Mental calculation strategies; Multi-digit arithmetic; Elementary school

This paper presents a “Day Number” routine involving the four arithmetic operations with multi-digit numbers. Students are challenged to use numbers and operations, according to their knowledge, to create a train of calculationsin which the answer to one calculationis used to start the nextone. The result of the last calculationneeds to be the number of the day where the lesson takes place. Using a qualitative approach, we undertook an exploratory study that aims to identify the arithmetic knowledge that 3rdgrade students activate when they are free to use any numbers and operations to calculate mentally in the “Day Number” routine. We focused our analysis on the numbers, operations and mental calculation strategies used by the students. Data werecollected through direct observation, video recording, field notes and students’ own productions. The analysis of students’ work shows that most of them combinedthe four arithmetic operations envisioning to construct long trains. In all the four arithmetic operations, students useddecomposition strategies; in addition/subtraction they also usedsequential strategies, and in multiplication/division their options involvedvarying strategies.