Young children’s early strategic thinking about partitive division

This paper presents an analysis of the early strategic thinking of 94 young children aged between 5 years 7 months and 6 years 5 months. These children were participants in a larger study of children in their first year of formal schooling in Australia at the time of the interview. They had not been formally taught multiplication or division in school. The children solved the problem 12 ÷ 3 = presented orally as a partitive task. Analysis of the children’s responses revealed that 89% of their solutions were correct. Children used a range of strategies to solve the task: more than half of the children (58%) achieved sharing by dealing, of whom 37% dealt by ones. Other children estimated the size of the shares and adjusted by ones. Consideration is also given to the difficulties experienced by unsuccessful children.