Measuring mental computational fluency with addition: a novel approach

Measuring computational fluency, an aspect of procedural fluency, is complex. Many attempts to measure this construct have emphasised accuracy and efficiency at the expense of flexibility and appropriate strategy choice. Efforts to account for these latter constructs through assessing children’s computational reasoning using structured interviews (e.g., MAI), are necessarily time-intensive. In this paper, we introduce a novel measure of Mental Computational Fluency with Addition (MCF-A) that attempts to incorporate these aspects by requiring children to reason from the perspective of another child. We describe results of a pilot study using the MCF-A with 169 Year 3 and 4 students.