Whole number computation also provides an instructive example of how routine-appearing procedural skills can be intertwined with the other strands of proficiency to increase the fluency with which the skills are used. For years, learning to compute has been viewed as a matter of following the teacher’s directions and practicing until speedy execution is achieved. Changes in career demands and the tasks of daily life, as well as the availability of new computing tools, mean that more is now demanded from the study of computation. More than just a means to produce answers, computation is increasingly seen as a window on the deep structure of the number system. Fortunately, research is demonstrating that both skilled performance and conceptual understanding are generated by the same kinds of activities. No tradeoffs are needed. As we detail below, the activities that provide this powerful result are those that integrate the strands of proficiency.

As students begin school, much of their number activity is designed to help them become proficient with single-digit arithmetic. By single-digit arithmetic, we mean the sums and products of single-digit numbers and their companion differences and quotients (e.g., 5+7=12, 12–5=7, 12–7=5 and 5×7=35, 35÷5=7, 35÷7=5). For most of a century, learning single-digit arithmetic has been characterized in the United States as “learning basic facts,” and the emphasis has been on memorizing those facts. We use the term basic number combinations to emphasize that the knowledge is relational and need not be memorized mechanically. Adults and “expert” children use a variety of strategies, including automatic or semiautomatic rules and reasoning processes to efficiently produce the basic number combinations.² Relational knowledge, such as knowledge of commutativity, not only promotes learning the basic number combinations but also may underlie or affect the mental representation of this basic knowledge.³

The domain of early number, including children’s initial learning of single-digit arithmetic, is undoubtedly the most thoroughly investigated area of school mathematics. A large body of research now exists about how children in many countries actually learn single-digit operations with whole numbers. Although some educators once believed that children memorize their “basic facts” as conditioned responses, research shows that children do not move from knowing nothing about the sums and differences of numbers to having the basic number combinations memorized. Instead, they move through a series of progressively more advanced and abstract methods for working out the answers