Abstract

This work presents a comparison in the performance of mental calculation tasks in primary education, between educational institutions adopting an open method based on numbers (ABN) and those employing traditional teaching methods, related to habitual practices by professors or as suggested by some textbooks. This experiment was conducted during the first-year courses of primary education in four schools, two of them public, another one was private, and the fourth one was private with subsidies from the Chilean government. We designed and applied a mental calculation test with two and three sum exercises. We used these to measure speed and precision. An analysis of inter-group differences showed the effectiveness of the ABN methodology when compared to traditional teaching. We discuss the results and their projections within Chile’s educational context.