Should math educators care about what is happening in numeracy education research? Is the addition of a numeracy course something that mathematics departments should consider in their course offerings? Numeracy is often conflated with math-lite and dismissed as not useful to mathematicians and math educators. The term is used interchangeably with…

The aim of this study is to investigate whether the model method is effective to assist primary students to solve word problems. The model method not only provides students with an opportunity to interpret the problem by drawing the rectangular bar but also helps students to visually represent problem situations and relevant relationships on the…

Distinguishing between sources of variability in mathematics performance may contribute to a more comprehensive theory of mathematics skills. Research has examined student differences based upon scores on achievement tests, which provide overall proficiency, but may not provide the detailed information for identifying and remediating difficulties.…

Researchers have proposed a variety of methods to make a connection between real life and mathematics so that it can be learned in a practical way and enable people to utilise mathematics in their daily lives. Model-eliciting activities (MEAs) were developed to fulfil this need and are very capable of serving this purpose. The reason MEAs are so…

To investigate student difficulties in solving word problems in algebra, we carried out a teaching experiment involving 51 Indonesian students (12/13 year-old) who used a digital mathematics environment. The findings were backed up by an interview study, in which eighteen students (13/14 year-old) were involved. The perspective of mathematization,…

This study investigated how metacognition appears as a socially shared phenomenon within collaborative mathematical word-problem solving processes of dyads of high-achieving pupils. Four dyads solved problems of different difficulty levels. The pupils were 10 years old. The problem-solving activities were videotaped and transcribed in terms of…

We confronted 151, 5th and 6th elementary grade pupils with a quantitative problem in a mathematics or religion class, to examine the influence of the context on pupils' understanding and solution of such problems inside and outside the mathematics class. Pupils were first asked to solve a problem about fair sharing either during a mathematics or…

This study focussed on how secondary school students construct and use mathematical models as conceptual tools when solving word problems. The participants were 511 secondary-school students who were in the final year of compulsory education (15-16 years old). Four levels of the development of constructing and using mathematical models were…

In its empirical part this paper establishes a general weak understanding of the process of applying a mathematical model. This is also evident in the way teachers regard the application of alternative sharing in their own problem solving and in relating to children's answers. The theoretical part analyses problems that are considered as…

Contends that, though much attention is given in mathematics to the problem of sensitizing people to the need for identifying elements of a situation and representing them symbolically, little or no effort is devoted to the problem of helping them express the relationships among these elements. (11 references) (MKR)

This paper discusses the types of word problems represented in Malaysia's primary one, primary two and primary three mathematics texts based on Van De Walle's model (1998) in the operations of addition and subtraction. A test was constructed to measure students' success based on this model. The data from this study indicates that the Malaysian…

Presents three teaching strategies requiring active student participation in which students (1) create and solve their own word problems; (2) generate trigonometric expressions to be solved by their classmates; and (3) act as points to model a basic locus of points. (MDH)

Students sometimes have difficulty in mathematics because they solve problems mechanically, without understanding the ideas represented by their equations. This brief note provides mathematics instructors with ideas for rectifying this fundamental flaw in students' paradigm of problem solving. (Contains 1 footnote.)

This study examined the hypothesis that prior experience with augmented-quotient problems would positively influence performance on remainder-only problems and quotient-only problems. Analysis of sixth through eighth grade students' (n=545) responses to test forms that systematically varied the order of appearance of these three division problems,…

After a year of instruction, 70 kindergarten children were individually interviewed as they solved basic, multistep, and nonroutine word problems. Thirty-two used a valid strategy for all 9 problems, and 44 correctly answered 7 or more problems. Modeling provided a unifying framework for thinking about problem solving. (Author/MDH)