Minor rewording of structurally identical change problems raises children's success from 36% to 55%¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · theoretical r3 · q2
Currency · newest study 2020 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i? Modifying the wording of problems sharing the same schema changed both difficulty and error types: the original start-unknown problem was solved by 36% of children, the reworded version by 55%. → Hippolyte Gros 2020

Evidence¶

Hippolyte Gros 2020¶

Hippolyte Gros, Jean-Pierre Thibaut, Emmanuel Sander. (2020). Semantic Congruence in Arithmetic: A New Conceptual Model for Word Problem Solving. Educational Psychologist. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2019.1691004

q2 · i? · theoretical · r3

The article reports, citing De Corte, Verschaffel and De Win (1985), that minor wording modifications of problems sharing the same schema impacted difficulty and error types. The printed success rates are 36% versus 55%; no effect size is printed.

"were only solved by 36% of the children in the study, whereas slightly reworded problems such as “Bob had some cookies. He got 2 more cookies. Now he has 5 cookies. How many cookies did Bob have in the beginning?” were solved by 55% of the children."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Representational pictures relate to better word problem-solving performance only with relatively simple tasks, with the largest effects for first-position-of-the-unknown problems — related
• Five of six investigated linguistic task characteristics (position of the unknown, schematic structure, irrelevant information, realistic considerations, lexical consistency) are associated with elementary schoolers' word problem-solving performance — a broader claim this one bears on
• Wording of test directions changed children's performance, with 'largest' failing and 'biggest' succeeding for primary-grade children — related