Abstract
Upper primary school children often routinely apply proportional methods to missing-value problems, also when this is inappropriate. We tested whether this tendency can be broken if children would pay more attention to the initial phases of the modelling process. Seventy-five 6th graders were asked to classify nine word problems with different underlying mathematical models and to solve a parallel version of these problems. Half of the children first did the solution and then the classification task, for the others the order was opposite. The results suggest a small positive impact of a preceding classification task on students’ later solutions, while solving the word problems first proved to negatively affect later classifications.
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Van Dooren, W., De Bock, D., Vleugels, K., Verschaffel, L. (2011). Word Problem Classification: A Promising Modelling Task at the Elementary Level. In: Kaiser, G., Blum, W., Borromeo Ferri, R., Stillman, G. (eds) Trends in Teaching and Learning of Mathematical Modelling. International Perspectives on the Teaching and Learning of Mathematical Modelling, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0910-2_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0910-2_6
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