Teachers' Approaches towards Word Problem Solving: Elaborating or Restricting the Problem Context

This article was published in Teaching and Teacher Education, Vol 26, Issue 2,
Author(s): Fien Depaepe, Erik De Corte and Lieven Verschaffel, “Teachers' Approaches towards Word Problem Solving: Elaborating or Restricting the Problem Context“, Pages 152-160, Copyright Elsevier (February 2010).

This contribution reports about a seven-month long video-based study in two regular Flemish sixth-grade mathematics classrooms. The focus is on teachers' approaches towards problem solving.

In their analysis the authors distinguished between a paradigmatic-oriented (focus on the mathematical structure) and a narrative-oriented (focus on the contextual aspects of a problem) perspective on the problem-solving process.

The findings have highlighted that the word problem-solving lessons were more dominated by a paradigmatic than a narrative approach and that interventions in which the relation between the mathematics structure and the realistic constraints of the problem context is addressed, were rare.