It has been firmly established that a pupil's choice of operation for the solution of a single-operation word problem is often affected by the types of numbers in the problem (Bell, Fischbein, & Greer, 1984; Bell, Swan, & Taylor, 1981; Fischbein, Deri, Nello, & Marino, 1985; Hart, 1981). A more specific observation is that a choice of different operations occurs even when two problems differing only in the numbers involved are juxtaposed and attention is drawn to the similarity between them (Ekenstam & Greger, 1983). Although several examples have been cited in the literature, such nonconservation of operations remains to be explored in more depth. Existing research affords four overlapping perspectives on the phenomenon.
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Brian Greer (1987) studied this question.