Solving Verbal Problems: Results and Implications from National Assessment

Abstract

Why can't children solve story problems? Two recent articles in the Arithmetic Teacher have opened with this question (West 1977; Zweng 1979). Results from the second NAEP mathematics assessment offer no definitive answers, but they do provide some interesting insights regarding children's ability to solve verbal problems (Carpenter et al., 1980). The assessment results indicate that the commonly held view that children cannot solve word problems may be an oversimplification. ln fact children were quite successful at solving some types of simple verbal problems. Performance was reasonably good on most problems that could be solved using a single operation of addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division. However, almost every problem that could not be solved by a routine application of a single arithmetic operation caused a great deal of difficulty.