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).
