Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When children perform fraction arithmetic, they generate a variety of solutions. In this study, we extended this research toadults. We report that adults performance is best for addition and subtraction, worse for division, and is susceptible to thesame kinds of strategy errors observed in 6th grade children. Specifically, solvers common strategy errors involved main-taining the values of fractions with common denominators even when that strategy was not appropriate. We also presenttwo other findings that were not observed in children. First, adults applied an incorrect division algorithm; they incorrectlyinverted the first, rather than the second operand in fraction division problems. Second, adults applied reduction proce-dures for fraction multiplication and division in order to simplify numerator-denominator pairs during fraction arithmetic.Our results suggest that strategy selection was cued by identifying common fraction components within problems.