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Related Experiment Videos

Why does placing the question before an arithmetic word problem improve performance? A situation model account.

Catherine Thevenot1, Michel Devidal, Pierre Barrouillet

  • 1University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. Catherine.Thevenot@pse.unige.ch

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (2006)
|December 13, 2006
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

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Children

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Educational Psychology
  • Mathematics Education

Background:

  • Understanding how individuals represent information to solve arithmetic word problems is crucial.
  • Two prominent theories, situation/mental model theory and schema theory, offer different explanations.
  • Prior research has explored problem-solving strategies, but the nature of representations remains debated.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the nature of representations used in solving arithmetic word problems.
  • To compare the explanatory power of situation/mental model theory versus schema theory.
  • To examine how problem difficulty and question placement influence problem-solving.

Main Methods:

  • A study involving fourth-grade students with varying mathematical abilities.

Related Experiment Videos

  • Participants were presented with arithmetic word problems of differing difficulty levels.
  • The position of the question (before or after the problem text) was manipulated.

    • Main Results:

    • A significant effect of question position was observed, with better performance when the question preceded the text.
    • This question-position effect was more pronounced for children with lower mathematical skills.
    • The effect was also stronger for more difficult arithmetic word problems.

    Conclusions:

    • The findings support the situation or mental model theory of problem representation.
    • The results are not adequately explained by the schema theory.
    • Individual differences in mathematical skills and problem complexity interact with representational strategies.