Flexibility and Adaptivity in Arithmetic Strategy Use: What Children Know and What They Show

Research shows that the strategies children actually use do not fully reflect the strategies they know: there is hidden potential. In the current study a sample of 147 third graders from the Netherlands completed a comprehensive assessment of adaptive expertise in the domain of multidigit subtraction, designed to measure, first, the strategies students know and use to solve subtraction problems (potential and practical flexibility).flexibility).

Second, it measured to what extent students know which strategy is optimal and to what extent they use the optimal strategy (potential and practical adaptivity). Findings for flexibility showed that most students consistently used the same strategy across all problems: practical flexibility was low. When prompted, students knew more strategies than they used spontaneously, suggesting hidden potential in flexibility.