Strategies for Solving Math Word Problems
Understanding Math Word Problems with San Francisco Math Teachers
Understanding math word problems can be difficult. This set of tools is the product of a SERP collaboration with middle school mathematics teachers in the San Francisco Unified School District. Over the course of several years, Phil Daro (SERP Bay Area Math Director and co-author of the Common Core State Standards in Mathematics), Professor Alan Schoenfeld (U.C. Berkeley), and a team of teachers and graduate students met monthly to explore together why students were struggling with math in the middle grades, and what they could do to support student learning. We began with data that indicated students did not struggle with particular math topics, but rather with particular problem types: word problems.
Reading Comprehension for Math Word Problems
Teachers conducted “think-alouds” with students, and found that many students began to solve problems without understanding the situation described, or the question being asked. They looked for signals that would indicate whether to subtract, multiply, or perform some other operation. The question our group pursued was this: how can we shift the culture of the mathematics classroom away from answer-getting and toward sense-making? We are not suggesting that getting answers is a bad goal, but when it is the only goal, genuine learning is undermined.
Let us know what you think!
We set out to identify relatively small shifts in practice that could create relatively big shifts in behavior and expanded to include fully designed diagnostic lessons. We hope others will find these strategies of value.
Phil Daro
The Case Against "Answer-Getting"
SERP has been supported to conduct this work by the S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.