Discussion of results
Cues and mis-cues
One of the most common behaviours exhibited by primary school children prior to being asked to draw a diagram was to perform an operation initiated by a cue word in the problem.
The word"times" in Problems 2 and 7 often resulted in operations iike 36*3 and 12*3. Stuart's comment while trying Problem 1 highlights this type of behaviour: "It says thrown it's got to be a subtract somewhere!" Such cue words act as mis-cues almost as frequently as they cue the appropriate operation. We suspect that the strategy of looking for cue words is actively encouraged by many textbooks and teachers. The speed with which children launched into operating on the numbers(without apparent reference to their meaning) was very striking. Typically, 12x8 and 12-8 were frequent attempts at Problem 1. while 36+3 and 12+3 were and even more common for Problems 2 and 7 respectively.