PRESERVICE ELEMENTARY TEACHERS' USE OF REALISTIC CONSIDERATIONS WHEN SOLVING PROBLEMATIC ARITHMETIC WORD PROBLEMS

José N. Contreras

The University of Southern Mississippi

Jose.Contreras@usm.edu

In this paper I examine the extent to which preservice elementary teachers use real-world knowledge and realistic considerations when solving problems in which the application of straightforward arithmetic operations is problematic, if one takes into consideration the reality of the context. A paper-and-pencil test was administered to 34 preservice elementary teachers. The test consisted of 10 experimental items and 5 buffer items. The experimental items were problematic in the sense that their correct solution is obtained by taking into account realistic considerations. The experimental items were based on Verschaffel and De Corte's (1997) study. Preservice teachers' performance was poor. The number of realistic responses varied from two to 25. One of the two lowest numbers of realistic responses was for the problem: At the end of the second year, 50 elementary school children try to obtain their athletics diploma. To get the athletic diploma they have to succeed in two tests: running 400m in less than 2 minutes and jumping 1.5m high. All the children participated in both tests. 9 children failed the running test and 12 failed the jumping test. How many children did not get their diplomas? One of the two highest numbers of realistic responses was for the problem: 1175 supporters must be used to the soccer stadium. Each bus can hold 40 supporters. How many buses are needed? As a summary, 82 (24%) out of 340 responses were correct or involved a realistic comment. Preservice teachers' tendency to ignore contextual realities of word problems is also examined in Contreras (2000).

References

Contreras, J. (2000). Preservice elementary teachers' difficulties when solving non-standard addition and subtraction application problems involving ordinal numbers. In Fernandez et. al. (2000), Proceedings of of the Twenty-Second Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Psychology of Mathematics Education. Tucson, AZ. Columbus, Ohio: ERIC.

Verschaffel, L., & De Corte, E. (1997). Teaching realistic mathematical modeling in the elementary school: A teaching experiment with fifth graders. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 28(5), 577-601.