• Journal of Educational Research in Mathematics
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.63-80
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• 2009

This paper has a purpose to find out the important points about linguistic factors suited to the assessment purpose and mathematics teaching/learning that a word-problem sentence has to possess. We also examine the degree of understanding of sentence and the perceptive/emotional reactions of students toward two different kinds of word-problem sentences that have same mathematical contents, but different linguistic structures. The objects of this thesis are 124 students from the third to sixth grade in an elementary school. We execute assessment of simple-sentence-word-problem and complex-sentence-word-problem that have same mathematical contexts, but different linguistic structures. Then we have compared and examined their own process of solving the two types word-problems and we make up questionnaire and have an interview with them. The conclusions are as followings: First, simple-sentence-word-problem is more successful to suggest an information for solving a problem than complex one. Second, it is hard to find the strategy for solving a problem in complex-sentence-word-problem than simple one. Third, students think that suggested information and mathematical knowledge are different according to the linguistic structure in the process of perceiving the information after reading a word-problem. Fourth, in spite of same sentence type, the negative mental reaction is showed greatly to complex-sentence-word-problem even before solving a problem.

• Journal of The Korean Association of Information Education
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.185-196
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• 2001

Elementary school students feel more difficult the mathematical word problems than the numberical formula. I think that this reason isn't the ability of mathematical calculation but the problems representation. It is demanded exactly understanding about the requirements of problem for improving ability of the mathematical word problem representation. It is necessary that we take multimedia data and communication for this, because web advances multimedia materialization and promotes mutual communication, then it gives us with the most environment for word problem representation learning. According to, this thesis is designed web-based system to improve ability of the mathematical word problem representation, applied the sixth grade it experimentally.

• Journal of Educational Research in Mathematics
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.267-281
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• 2004

Many students feel the word problems are very difficult. This study analyzes the linguistic and cognitive factors that affect word problem solving so that we help students bring through the difficulty. There are a text base, a situation model, and a real world in the linguistic aspects. Students have a difficulty at the transition from text base to situation model(equation), and make lots of errors at the situation model. In the cognitive aspects, I investigated problem solving schemes, strategies, and complexity level. Students are likely to choose strategy by the contents which teacher instructed, but not by low complexity level, and mix up the amount of sugar and sugar water, and concentration. We can recognize how complex the types of word problems are to solve, which strategies students choose largely, and what errors that students make in the problem solving are.

• School Mathematics
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.497-511
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• 2009

This study compared two problem solving instructional approaches, schema based sequence instruction and schema based parallel instruction on word problem solving performance of elementary school students who were in general students group. The subjects totaled 48 third grade students who were exposed to a test that consisted of 9 word problem items of three types for 4 sessions. First of all, the baseline of word problem performance level was measured without any training. During session 1, 2 and 3 participants were put into strategic training groups. The experiment was designed by two between factor(two intervention group and two within factors(two problem types, three sessions). The results of experiment were as follows. Schema based sequence instruction group performed significantly better than students in another group on word problem solving performance. The effect of strategic schema based Instruction revealed that solving word problems relied upon problem types, sessions and input orders which were of great value.

• School Mathematics
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.479-496
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• 2009

Some children can construct a basic concept of addition and subtraction during the preschool years. Children start to experience mathematics via numbers and their of operations and contact with various contexts of addition and subtraction. In special, word problems reflect mathematics which is appliable to real life. In this paper, I analyse the types of word problems in text book and its students' responses. First, I analyse the types of addition word problems which consist of change add-into situations and part-part-whole situations. Second, I analyse the types of subtraction word problems which consist of change take-away situations, compare situations and equalize situations. Third, I analyse the students' responses by the types of word problems in addition and subtraction. And 115 2nd grade elementary school students participated in this survey. The following results have been drawn from this study. First, the proposition of word problems of part-part-whole situations is higher than that of change add-into situations and the proposition of word problems of take-away situations is higher than that of compare situations and equalize situations. According to the analysis about students' responses, It is no difference between change add-into situations and part-part-whole situations. But the proposition of word problems of take-away situations is higher than that of compare situations and equalize situations. This results from word problems which contain unnecessary information in problem. So, we have to present the various word problems to students.

• The Mathematical Education
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• v.60 no.4
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• pp.509-527
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• 2021

We investigated whether and how pre-service teachers took the realistic contexts seriously in the course of solving word problems; additionally, we investigated how pre-service teachers evaluated students' realistic and non-realistic answers to word problems. Many pre-service teachers, similar to students, solved some of the realistic problems unrealistically without taking the realistic contexts seriously. Besides, they evaluated students' non-realistic answers higher than the realistic answers. Whether the pre-service teachers could solve problems realistically or not, they did not appreciate students' realistic considerations for the reasons that those were not fitted to the intentions of the word problems, or those were evidence of the flaws of the problem. Furthermore, the analysis of premises implied in the pre-service teachers' evaluation comments showed the implicit didactic contracts about realistic word problem solving that they accepted and also anticipated students to follow. Our analysis of the pre-service teachers' conceptions of realistic word problems can help teacher educators design the teacher program to challenge and revise pre-service teachers' folk pedagogy.

• Communications of Mathematical Education
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.761-783
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• 2009

Problem solving ability can be fostered by dealing with many different types of problems. We investigated how $5^{th}$ and $6^{th}$ graders who did not learn traditional algebraic methods might approach the word problems of simultaneous equations. This result reveals that the strategy of guess-and-check serves as a basis for elementary school students in solving simultaneous equations. A noticeable remark is that students used the guess-and-check strategy in various ways. Whereas some students changed a variable given in the problem step by step, others did in a sophisticated way focusing on the relation between two variables. Moreover, some students were able to write an equation which was not typical but meaningful and correct. This paper emphasizes the need of connections between pre-algebraic and algebraic solutions.

• Journal of the Korean School Mathematics Society
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.117-132
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• 2008

This paper has analyzed the problem of the inequality unit in 7th National curriculum 8-Ga stage from the following points. First, in respect to the written questions of the inequality unit over every textbook of 7th National curriculum, how are they allocated according to subject matters and what are their weak points? Second. how many of them are related to the authentic daily life or other subjects and what kind of subjects are they? Third, what are the problems related to the authentic daily life situation or what are the problems that have some inter-sentential errors, and what kinds of measures for their improvement can be taken? In keeping with view points above, we have analyzed the contents in current 16 different textbooks on th basis of their subject matters and especially put the emphasis on the relation to daily life and other subjects. Consequently, we found there are many textbooks that do not include various subject matters and that can not be related to various other subjects. It is necessary to connect mathematics to various daily life matters and other subjects to improve students' creativity and to make students understand the practicality of mathematics.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.11 no.8
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• pp.315-324
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• 2022

In this paper, we propose KoEPT, a Transformer-based generative model for automatic math word problems solving. A math word problem written in human language which describes everyday situations in a mathematical form. Math word problem solving requires an artificial intelligence model to understand the implied logic within the problem. Therefore, it is being studied variously across the world to improve the language understanding ability of artificial intelligence. In the case of the Korean language, studies so far have mainly attempted to solve problems by classifying them into templates, but there is a limitation in that these techniques are difficult to apply to datasets with high classification difficulty. To solve this problem, this paper used the KoEPT model which uses 'expression' tokens and pointer networks. To measure the performance of this model, the classification difficulty scores of IL, CC, and ALG514, which are existing Korean mathematical sentence problem datasets, were measured, and then the performance of KoEPT was evaluated using 5-fold cross-validation. For the Korean datasets used for evaluation, KoEPT obtained the state-of-the-art(SOTA) performance with 99.1% in CC, which is comparable to the existing SOTA performance, and 89.3% and 80.5% in IL and ALG514, respectively. In addition, as a result of evaluation, KoEPT showed a relatively improved performance for datasets with high classification difficulty. Through an ablation study, we uncovered that the use of the 'expression' tokens and pointer networks contributed to KoEPT's state of being less affected by classification difficulty while obtaining good performance.

• Education of Primary School Mathematics
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.83-97
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• 2023

Nominalization is one of the grammatical metaphors that makes it easier to mathematize the target that needs to be converted into a formula, but it has the disadvantage of making problem understanding difficult due to complex and compressed sentence structures. To investigate how this nominalization affects students' problem-solving processes, an analysis was conducted on 233 third-grade elementary school students' problem solving of eight arithmetic word problems with or without nominalization. The analysis showed that the presence or absence of nominalization did not have a significant impact on their problem understanding and their ability to convert sentences to formulas. Although the students did not have any prior experience in nominalization, they restructured the sentences by using nominalization or agnation in the problem understanding stage. When the types of nominalization change, the rate of setting the formula correctly appeared high. Through this, the use of nominalization can be a pedagogical strategy for solving word problems and can be expected to help facilitate deeper understanding.