Unit 2: Teacher Strategies for 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 2 focuses on teaching strategies that can be applied to help students that are experiencing difficulty with solving word problems. The two strategies suggested are the use of metacognition and scaffolding.

The key objective for the unit is to differentiate various student strategies to create effective lesson activities and evaluation.

Methodology

The assignment for this unit was to"write a learning objective and motivation for your lesson utilizing the information in regards to teacher strategies." As I read through the unit material, I thought about how students can benefit from intertwining the metacognitive skills with the six scaffolding steps to solving word problems. If students can analyze, plan, and monitor each step they take in solving word problems, they will be guiding themselves deep into each word problem which will lead to full understanding and confidence with working on these types of problems. The objectives I came up with for my lesson are as follows:

Students will be able to:

- use the necessary metacognitive skills to analyze word problems, select an appropriate strategy to solve the problem, and monitor the problem solving process to ensure that it is carried out correctly

- use the metacognitive skills (awareness, planning, and monitoring) with each of Kajamies' (2010) steps in the Model of Skillful Problem Solving

Findings

With the actually unit, the laying out of metacognitive teaching skills and scaffolding steps to solving word problems are great strategies to bring forth to the learners. I personally already used a form of the six scaffolding steps with my current students, so I got to add the metacognitive part of the unit to my classroom environment. I found it took too long for me to find the correct video. The website link does not allow the instructor to link the single video, so the learner has to scroll through the list of videos to find the correct one.

One of the great things I got out of my objectives was that my students went way more in depth with solving the word problems than they would have without the lesson. Having students self-instruct, self-question, and self-check each step they take throughout the word problems is the key for them to be absorbed into very aspect of the problem. The students seem to understand the word problems more in depth when they were forced to spend time using the metacognitive skills for each step, but I could tell they found using this method redundant. Many students complained about writing out each their self-thinking for each of the six steps and how it was "too much writing" for a mathematics activity. Other students felt that they were at times over analyzing parts of the questions and were not concentrating on or forget to do the necessary arithmetic of the problem. Writing is a different kind of activity for a mathematics classroom, but it is a different way for students to show their understanding and to make the material stick even better in their minds. Over analyzing can lead to complication issues with understanding and solving words problems, so this is something to consider with the whole class and more specifically the individuals showing difficulty.

Conclusion

Metacognition and scaffolding are two teaching skills that should be included in the construction of lessons for solving word problems. For the metacognition video, I would recommend putting as a caption next to the link, "Metacognition Video: Session 9" so people can locate the video easier among the full list of educational videos on the website. The issues of the feelings of redundancy among my students I believe are due to the procedure created for my lesson, not due the objectives created for this particular assignment. For more on the procedure used for the lesson, see the Unit 3 case study.