Written Story Problems
Nancy Krasa, Karen Tzanetopoulos, Colleen Maas · 2022
Solving story problems calls upon every academic, cognitive, and executive skill a child can muster: basic arithmetic facts, strategies, and procedures; vocabulary, verbal comprehension, reasoning, and reading; and attention, cognitive inhibition and flexibility, working memory, and understanding. This chapter reviews the ways in which story problems differ from real-life problems and takes a brief look at the difficulties that some children have with the demands of reading and arithmetic within them. The bulk of the chapter then discusses the challenge of understanding what the problem is asking by closely examining such problems’ unique and toughest hurdles: distracting cover stories, irrelevant information, the order of numerical information, the location of the question, complex grammar, operation-inconsistent language, comparison terms, prose density, and working memory demands. Finally, it demonstrates the futility of a key-word approach and contrasts it with the utility of teaching students how to draw schematic diagrams. The classroom activities focus on teaching story-problem language explicitly and directly and on simplifying the language for struggling students; they also cover the most powerful solution strategy: meaningful diagrams.