• Education of Primary School Mathematics
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.177-191
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• 2016

Students can calculate the addition and subtraction problem using informal knowledge before receiving the formal instruction. Recently, the value that a computation lesson focus on the understanding and developing the various strategies is highlighted by curriculum developers as well as in reports. Ideally, a educational setting and classroom culture reflected students' learning and problem solving strategies. So, this paper analyzed the similarity and difference with respect to the numeric sentence and word problem in the addition and subtraction. The subjects for the study were 100 third-grade Korean students and 68 third-grade American students. Researcher developed the questionnaire in the addition and subtraction and used it for the survey. The following results have been drawn from this study. The computational ability of Korean students was higher than that of American students in both the numeric sentence and word problem. And it was revealed the differences of the strategies which were used problem solving process. Korean students tended to use algorithms and numbers' characters and relations, but American students tended to use the drawings and algorithms with drawings.