Hickendorff Marian
Educational Sciences, Institute of Education and Child Studies, Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands.
Front Psychol. 2021 Oct 18;12:727761. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.727761. eCollection 2021.
Solving arithmetic word problems requires constructing a situation model based on the problem text and translating that into a mathematical model. As such, word problem solving makes demands on students' language comprehension and their domain-general cognitive resources. These demands may decrease when students get more experienced and use strategies that do not require fully understanding the situation presented in the problem. The current study aims to address this hypothesis. Students (=444) from third to sixth grade solved a paper-and-pencil task with 48 mathematics problems, comprising symbolic arithmetic problems and standard word problems, as well as more complex word problems that involve two arithmetic steps or include irrelevant numerical information. Their performance was analyzed with multilevel logistic regression analyses. Results showed that within each grade, performance on the different problem types did not differ, suggesting that already in third-grade students seem helped nor hindered by presenting arithmetic problems in a story, even if that story contains irrelevant numerical information. Non-verbal reasoning was more important in standard word problems than in arithmetic problems in symbolic format in one-step arithmetic, and reading comprehension was more important in solving two-step arithmetic word problems than in one-step arithmetic word problems.
解决算术应用题需要根据问题文本构建情境模型，并将其转化为数学模型。因此，解决应用题对学生的语言理解能力和一般认知资源提出了要求。当学生经验更丰富并使用不需要完全理解题目中所呈现情境的策略时，这些要求可能会降低。本研究旨在验证这一假设。三至六年级的444名学生完成了一项纸笔任务，其中包含48道数学题，包括符号算术题、标准应用题，以及涉及两个算术步骤或包含无关数字信息的更复杂应用题。通过多层次逻辑回归分析对他们的表现进行了分析。结果表明，在每个年级中，不同类型问题的表现没有差异，这表明即使故事中包含无关数字信息，三年级学生似乎也不会因以故事形式呈现算术问题而得到帮助或受到阻碍。在一步算术的标准应用题中，非言语推理比符号形式的算术题更重要，而在解决两步算术应用题时，阅读理解比一步算术应用题更重要。
