The relationship between number knowledge and strategy use: what we can learn from the priming paradigm

Priming methods involve showing a stimulus for a short amount of time (the prime), followed by a second stimulus (the target), which children are asked to perform some operation on. If there is a strong association between the prime and target for a particular child, then the operation on the target will be facilitated by the presence of the prime. This paper describes a project in which priming methods are used to add to our understanding of strategy development for simple addition problems. Children were asked to complete two activities; a priming trial designed to demonstrate priming effects for doubling, and a set of addition problems where participants were asked to explain how they arrived at their answers. Approximately half of the participants used counting strategies (count-on from first, count-on from smallest), while half used non-counting strategies (decomposition, tie or retrieval). Results indicate that a priming effect for doubling relationships but only for the group of children using non-counting strategies. This result could help to explain the relationship between the development of number knowledge and the development of new strategies.