Author:

Keywords:

Social Sciences, Education & Educational Research, Psychology, Educational, Psychology, 1302 Curriculum and Pedagogy, 1303 Specialist Studies in Education, 1701 Psychology, Education, 3902 Education policy, sociology and philosophy, 3904 Specialist studies in education, 5201 Applied and developmental psychology

Abstract:

Recent research has documented that many pupils show a strong tendency to exclude real-world knowledge from their solutions of school arithmetic word problems. In the present study, a test consisting of 14 word problems-half of which were problematic From a realistic point of view-was administered to a large group of students from three different leacher training institutes in Flanders. For each word problem, the student-teachers were first asked to solve the problem themselves, and afterwards to evaluate four different answers given by pupils. The results revealed a strong tendency among student-teachers to exclude real-world knowledge from their own spontaneous solutions of school word problems as well as from their appreciations of the pupils' answers. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.