“How Do Students Get Answers Like These?” Nine Steps in Diagnosing Computation Errors

Abstract

There is growing recognition that the bulk of the traditional, norm-referenced tests fail to help teachers make instructional decisions. In rejecting these measures, diagnosticians and teachers alike are seeking strategies for identifying and directly remediating mistakes students make in arithmetic computation. This article presents a step-by-step series of operations for analyzing and categorizing arithmetic errors, for selecting corrective strategies, and for applying peer-referenced standards to judge the performance of special-needs students.