THE ROLE OF REWORDING AND CONTEXT PERSONALIZATION IN THE SOLVING OF MATHEMATICAL WORD-PROBLEMS

The impact of both personalizing mathematical word problems and rewording them for explicitness was tested with 68 second-grade students and 59 fifth-grade students in a within-subjects design. Analyses of problem-solving scores showed that the second grade students benefited only when personalization and rewording were used in combination. The fifth graders, however, benefited consistently from personalization but realized no advantages from rewording. These findings suggest that the potential benefits for translating problems are supplanted for more experienced problem solvers by their better developed schemata for representing the problem structures. Regardless of problem-solving experience, personalization was interpreted as making problems more motivating and easier to represent mentally in relation to existing knowledge.