Influence of rewording verbal problems on children's problem representations and solutions.

Abstract

Investigated the influence of changes in the wording of simple addition and subtraction problems without affecting their semantic structure on (1) the level of difficulty of those problems for 1st and 2nd graders and (2) the nature of their errors. Two series of 6 rather difficult word problems were administered near the end of the school year to 4 1st-grade classes and 4 2nd-grade classes having totals of 89 and 84 children, respectively. In Series 1, the problems were stated in the usual form in which they normally appear in 1st graders' textbooks. In Series 2, the same kind of problems were reformulated so that the semantic relations between sets were clearer to young children. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data produced findings that supported the hypothesis that rewording the problem in such a way that the semantic relations are made more explicit facilitates the construction of an appropriate mental representation. The present study also contains suggestions concerning the direction in which educators can search for rewordings that are helpful in overcoming some of the difficulties that children experience in learning to solve word problems. (17 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)