Children's additive concepts: Promoting understanding and the role of inhibition

► Promotion of arithmetic concepts and inhibition skills were examined in Grades 3, 4, and 5. ► Children solved 3-term addition and subtraction problems and completed two inhibition tasks. ► A demonstration of conceptually-based shortcuts was given to half of the children. ► The demonstration increased shortcut use, particularly if it was preferred to computation. ► Weak inhibitors failed to inhibit computation to use a conceptually-based shortcut.