The study assessed a range of basic arithmetic abilities of 15 trainable mentally retarded students. Tasks were administered to the students individually over three sessions. Subjects were generally capable of rule-governed counting and other counting skills such as the cardinality rule. A number of subjects were capable of mentally comparing numbers and choosing the larger. At least one subject appeared to have invented a more economical mental addition strategy. Some subjects demonstrated a basic form of problem solving: They used the addition identity and commutativity principles to short-cut computational effort. Implications for the classroom teacher and future research are described.
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Baroody et al. (1983) studied this question.