Strategy Use and Estimation Ability of College Students

Relations among the number and types of strategies used when estimating, quantitative ability, and computational estimation ability were investigated. Through use of a “thinking aloud” procedure, estimation strategies used by undergraduate nonmathematics majors were identified and categorized into eight types. Students of relatively high quantitative ability were better estimators and used a greater number of strategy types than students of relatively low quantitative ability. Independent of quantitative ability, however, neither the number nor the type of strategy used was found to be related to success at estimating.