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Saturday, January 4, 2014

Difficulties in understanding word problems in Mathematics


Many primary school students in Singapore often face several difficulties when they solve word problems in Mathematics.  Broadly, the difficulties can be categorized into three groups: - (1) Lack of sense making in students, (2) Difficulties in comprehending word problems and (3) Struggle with comparative phrases and relational statements.

Lack of sense making in students
Verschaffel, Greer & De Corte (2000) and Schoenfeld (1992) observed that students have a tendency to disconnect mathematical problem solving from the real world. When solving word problems, students find it very important to recognize familiar key words; select an appropriate operation; produce an answer through some mathematical computations from the given data without making sense of the demands of the word problem (Foong, 2009). In addition, students have a tendency to rush into solving questions and inevitably suspend their ability to make sense when they solve mathematics word problems. This could be a potential impediment as it hinders the development of problem solving and critical thinking skills, which are the important emphasis in the Singapore school mathematics curriculum.

Difficulties in comprehending word problems
Difficulties in comprehending word problems can come from the semantic structure of the problem and its language consistency with the required operations. Foong (2009) discovered that students’ failure to solve word problems was not due to their lack of arithmetic ability but their inability to construct an appropriate problem representation as a result of the way the problem was structured. Depending on how a word problem is phrased, students often find it difficult to solve word problems as they do not fully comprehend and understand the demands of the word problem. 

The struggle with comparative phrases and relational statements

With the above, Ng & Lee (2004) also postulated that students struggle with comparative phrases. They fumble with relational terms such as more than, less than, as much as and as many as. In certain cases, students lacked the linguistic and conceptual knowledge to comprehend the relational statements and have the misconception that the answer to the word problem can be obtained by performing one or more mathematical operations with the numbers provided. This struggle becomes increasingly difficult when the relational statement does not go along with the expected operation (Verschaffel, 1994).