Young children use informal strategies to solve arithmetic word problems. The Situation Strategy First (SSF) framework claims that these strategies prevail even after instruction. The present study was conducted with second grade students in order to investigate the persistence of intuitive, situation- based strategies, on word problems that do not involve dynamic temporal changes. This is challenging for the SSF framework, since the lack of this dimension might bypass intuitive strategies. The results revealed that intuitive strategies persist, are valid for these types of problems, and impact the problems' difficulty. Indeed problems that require the application of arithmetic principles remain hard, even though they have been practiced at school. These findings provide complementary evidence to how mental calculation strategies articulate with arithmetic word problem solving and call for the extension of the SSF framework.

Intuitive conceptions are prevalent among young learners and can impose constraints to knowledge acquisition. Even though the data suggests that instruction does not eradicate them, this phenomenon has rarely been quantified. In this study we raise the question of how robust intuitive conceptions are. Moreover, we look at their persistence long after instruction of the studied notions. Production tasks concerning the four elementary arithmetic operations were used for measuring the degree to which they prevail and impose constraints among adults, 131 bachelor students as well as 168 high-school teachers and 57 mathematics teachers. The findings revealed that in most cases (88.93%) participants evoked examples that are congruent with an intuitive conception. This was observed for all the arithmetic operations and populations involved in the study. Even when explicitly prompted to find incongruent cases, they failed on two thirds of the cases. The educational entailments of these findings are discussed.