Determining Importance
Determining what is important is a critical step in solving word problems. Students are given a variety of information within a word problem that has to be sorted and organized and put into a context that the student can understand. Sometimes, word problems have extraneous information to see if the student really understands what is being asked of them. Students need to decide what is important on several different levels. When reading a word problem they have to consider the text as a whole, each sentence, and even each word.(12) It is important for teachers to help students distinguish irrelevant and interesting information from what is important.
Most word problems follow a three-part format. There is the context of the problem, the information within the problem, followed by the question. The KWC can be very helpful in addressing the three components of a word problem format. When the K (What do I Know for sure?) is being filled out by the student, it helps to lay out the context of the word problem as well as the mathematical information. When the W (What do I want to find out?) is being filled out, children are clearly identifying the second and third components of a word problem. A student working on a word problem cannot figure out what is important amongst the various pieces of information in a word problem until he or she has read the question (done the W) and has thought about what the problem is all about. If a student is doing the KWC carefully, he or she should have a listing of what they know for sure. The student should have thought about and considered what are facts and what are inferences. He or she should also have thought about the question being asked, What do I want to find out? Finally, he or she should have considered the special conditions or constraints.
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