Mathematics word-problems continue to be an insurmountable challenge for many middle school students. Educators have used pictorial and schematic illustrations within the classroom to help students visualize these problems. However, the data shows that pictorial representations can be more harmful than helpful in that they only display objects or persons while neglecting the spatial relationships between those components (Hegarty & Kozhevnikov, p. 686). Research supports schematic diagrams that highlight spatial relationships and focus on related information within the problem (Hegarty & Kozhevnikov, 1999; van Garderen & Montague, 2003). In addition to these strategies, educators have used heuristics (systematic scripted procedures to solve word problems) as a way to provide structure and routine to a variety of word problems. This review of the literature found varying results for the use of some heuristics being implemented in present-day classrooms. On the other hand, both visual-spatial diagrams and heuristics have demonstrated value in middle school special education classrooms. These findings support the further use and research of visual-spatial representations and problemsolving heuristics in order to solve mathematics word problems.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.