Introduction
Many students have difficulties when attempting to solve word problems. Many reasons are given for the students' lack of success in word problems.(¹) These reasons include students' lack of exposure to life outside of television and their neighborhoods, minimal reading skills, and difficulty in comprehension skills. I do not dispute these reasons for students' failure, but I propose that there is a way to ensure that problem solving permeates the mathematics classroom while simultaneously maintaining student interest. I have tried to develop a series of lessons that will help teachers develop various strategies to teach problem solving in their classrooms. It is my hope that implementing this curriculum unit will help teachers to teach problem solving in a way that will excite students, assist their connection and application of "real world" scenarios to the problems, aid their use of various strategies, and extend students' abilities to solve math problems in other contexts.
I teach in a school district with approximately 50,000 students. They are 86% African American, and 74% are eligible for free or reduced lunch. For the past 12 years, I have taught in under-resourced, urban areas. My students come with various academic deficiencies. Some of these deficiencies can be positively affected in the classroom, some cannot. Since NCLB has come into existence, when we speak about student outcomes there is not much that matters except for their standardized test scores at the end of each school year. If students meet standards according to our state test, schools are viewed as successful and the stress in "passing the test" is put off for another year. Sometimes, students can pass the test while simultaneously doing poorly on specific domains. One of the domains that my students have consistently performed poorly on is problem solving.
For the past few years I have focused on mathematics, being a middle school math coach at one time, and most recently being the Early Intervention Program (EIP) math teacher for grades three, four, and five in my school. According to my state, EIP is designed to serve students who are at risk of not reaching or maintaining academic grade level. The purpose of EIP is to provide additional instructional resources to help students who are performing below grade level obtain the necessary academic skills to reach grade level performance in the shortest possible time.(2) Whether in the classroom teaching all subjects, or whether focusing on one subject area, namely math, I have noticed that problem solving has always been a weak area for my students.
Each year, students come into my classroom who are supposed to possess skills that are prerequisites for the math activities that I teach. Usually, they don't. More often than not, there is a great disparity between what the students need to know to "get started" and what they actually know. Of course, I have to begin my instruction "where they are." This means that I will not have the privilege of merely working on word problems and the strategies with which to solve them. I will have to teach my students how to add two-digit numbers and how to regroup. If they master these two skills, I will need to teach them how to add three-digit addends with regrouping as well. This will be an added issue as I work with my students on nuances involved in word problems.
Ultimately, I would like for teachers to view this unit as one that assists them in helping students to master the complex skills of critical thinking and solving word problems in the primary grades. As the math portions of our standardized tests become more difficult for our students to master because of the plethora of word problems they contain, it is my hope that understanding the different dimensions of word problems will help teachers to become more thoughtful of their content as they present them to their students.
Comments: