Unit 1: Issues with Students Solving Word Problems

Back to: Case Study: Word Problems in Mathematics

Mini-Lesson used for Case Study: Word Problems in Mathematics: Teaching/Student Strategies to Comprehend Word Problems by Victoria Keller

Aims & Objectives

This case study of Unit 1 focuses on the learner using the reflection process as an introduction to the unit. The learner is expected to reflect on their personal experiences with word problems.

The key objective for this unit is to utilize teaching strategies from personal experiences to create a motivation and learning objective for a problem solving lesson.

Methodology

The assignment for the unit was to simply, "Reflect on your experiences about word problems", so I completed a reflection of my own personal experiences:

"My personal experiences with word problems can be broken down into two groups: when I was a student, and when I was teaching in a mathematics classroom. Mathematics was always one of my stronger subjects while I was a student, but I did seem to have difficulty with word problems. It was rarely an issue of messing up the computations. Instead, much of my difficulties arose from analyzing the word problems, pulling out the essential information, and deciding on a strategy in order to solve the problem. Similar to what Victoria Keller stated, "Children may be able to correctly compute equations, however when put in words students are at a stand still." My personal reading impediments resulted in me becoming very frustrated with word problems and led to me asking for constant help from peers and teachers. Over much time and practice, I eventually became much better at deciphering word problems to pull out the important information necessary to solve the given problems. Much of it credit to patience, not being afraid to reread the word problem a couple times, and underlining/circling information in the word problems to organize my thoughts.

These personal experiences as a student have helped me develop teaching strategies that help the students in my classrooms gain the skills necessary to solve word problems. One of the ways I was able to improve my skills was by practicing different word problems on a frequent basis because constant practice led to positive results. To ensure my students receive this frequent exposure to word problems, I provide an assignment at the beginning of each week called "The Problem of the Week" which provides students with a mathematical word problem to be completed within the week of school. These assignments are not meant for students to just solve the problem. Students are required to show multiple steps to solving the word problems, such as underlining the important information of the word problem, providing a strategy they will use to answer the question, showing all their work along with the answer, and including an explanation at the end of how their answer relates/answers the original question. Giving students constant practice with different word problems and requiring the problems to be broken down into steps allow students to practice and understand the steps necessary to solving word problems and checking that they are being solved correctly."

Findings

I found that during the reflection process, I broke my personal experiences into ones that occurred while I was a student and while teaching in the classroom. It was not specified in the directions of the assignment if we were to concentrate on just our teaching experiences or if we were allowed to bring in our student occurrences with word problems.

Conclusions

A change I would make to Assignment #1 in Unit 1 is to specify that the learner should reflect on not only their experiences to word problems from a teacher's point of view, but also the experiences they faced as a student in a mathematics classroom. Requiring the learner to reflect on what worked for them with solving word problems can lead to better realization of what is necessary for students to acquire these skills and what teachers should include in their lessons to guarantee student understanding of word problems.