In recent decades, research in the field of the Didactics of Mathematics as well as Cognitive Psychology has revealed many details related to how the learning of various concepts and situations in Basic Arithmetic takes place, which are unknown to the majority of teachers in our country.
Utilizing all of this modern data, this book presents the way in which a child arrives at the understanding of the concept of number, starting from the knowledge and skills they possess even from preschool age. It examines, in a developmental course, the abilities of oral counting, enumeration, number conservation, writing it down, basic additions and subtractions, etc.
The book also presents how the mental learning of the four basic arithmetic operations begins from preschool age and evolves until adulthood, as well as the storage of their results in memory. It analyzes and provides rules for classifying and evaluating, for the educator, the problems solved using the four operations. The classifications of these problems can be applied even in the early grades of junior high school.
Furthermore, the algorithms of written arithmetic operations and the properties that compose them are analyzed, along with presenting the errors that students make in these operations. The content of this book is primarily addressed to teachers, nursery school educators, and instructors of the first grades of junior high school. It is also aimed at all those engaged scientifically in the teaching of basic arithmetic (curriculum developers, school advisors, trainers, researchers in the Didactics of Mathematics), as well as parents and researchers in Cognitive Psychology and educators dealing with mathematical topics.
