The award lecture:
Routine versus adaptive expertise in elementary arithmetic strategies
Abstract
One of the major challenges in (research on) elementary arithmetic is to develop in children a disposition towards adaptive rather than merely routine use of strategies when doing various kinds of arithmetic tasks. Such a disposition towards the development and efficient, flexible and insightful use of a variety of arithmetic strategies has become a major goal of elementary school curricula all over the world. But there are several major issues related to the learning and teaching of such a disposition, such as: What do we exactly mean by efficient, flexible and insightful use of an arithmetic strategy? When to teach for adaptive expertise? How to teach for it? Is it a valuable and feasible goal for all children, including the weaker ones? In this talk these issues will be addressed in general first; afterwards we will exemplarily present a line of studies wherein we have investigated the theme of adaptive expertise in the domain of multi-digit subtraction.
The appointment of Professor Lieven Verschaffel of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, in 2017 is as follows:
The award is given to Professor Verschaffel in recognition of his outstanding contribution to elementary mathematics education over several decades. His research on number, arithmetic and mathematical problem solving has had a considerable influence on the work of several colleagues in MND. Moreover, his collaborations, whether with PhD students or the best-known professors in the field, all receive the same devotion to detail, an encyclopaedic knowledge of the fields in which he is engaged and the acknowledgment that his success is in no small part due to the strength of his team in Leuven. An exceptionally engaging speaker, Lieven will give a very significant and insightful summary of some of his recent work. Details of the time, location and title of his talk will be announced later in the year.
