Making sense of realistic word problems: portraying working class ‘failure’ on a division with remainder problem

Abstract

Children of 10-11 years of age were interviewed while undertaking a range of mathematic problems, most of which embedded mathematical operations in textually represented realistic settings. One problem, concerning a lift moving people in the morning rush, comprised a division-with-remainder problem in which children are required, conventionally, to introduce a particular realistic consideration in order to produce the 'correct' answer. Another problem was an extended version of this, requiring children to comment on four competing answers produced by other children. Analysis of responses to the first of these two problems demonstrated that it was working class children who were especially likely to fail to produce the conventionally required answer. Having shown this, the paper concentrates on portraying the ways in which 'failing' working class children interpret and respond to the two problems. Our purpose here is to contribute to understanding the difficulties working class children appear to have in negotiating the demands of contextualized problems.

Procedural versus content‐related hints for word problem solving: an exploratory study

“…Those who have difficulty in solving word problems often do not know how to use their reading skills and mathematical knowledge to analyse and explore the problem situation adequately. As a result, they do not succeed in formulating a correct solution plan (Cooper & Harries, 2005;Verschaffel et al, 1999).…”

Making Sense of Situations and Language Choices in Mathematical Word Problem Solving: A Case of Grade 9 Second Language Learners

“…Contrary to this, the results of this study suggest that with well-planned and effective teacher development interventions, the issue of context in mathematics teaching may play a pivotal role in the development of learners' problem-solving abilities. The test results indicated that current school instruction given for mathematical word problems is likely to develop in students a tendency to exclude real-world knowledge and/or reality in their solution processes (Cooper & Harries, 2005;Greer, 1997;Verschaffel, De Corte, Lasure, Vaerenbergh, Bogaerts, & Ratinckx, 1999).…”

The GF Mathematics Library

“…An archetypal meeting point for natural language processing and mathematics education is the realm of word problems [4,14,15], a realm in which mechanised mathematics assistants (MMA) are expected to play an ever more prominent role in the years to come.…”