Fifth-grade students’ approaches to and beliefs of mathematics word problem solving: a large sample Hungarian study

Mathematical word problems used in Verschaffel et al.’s (Learning and Instruction 7:339–359, 1994) study were applied in several follow-up studies. The goal of the present study was to replicate and extend the results of this line of research in a large sample of Hungarian students using an alternative set of data-gathering and data-analysis techniques. 4,037 students forming a nationwide representative sample of the Hungarian fifth-grade student population (aged 10–11) completed the test. The test contained five word problems from the list of 10 P(‘problematic)-items from Verschaffel et al.’s test. In contrast to all previous research in this domain, we used a multiple-choice format, where three options were given for each task: (a) routine-based, non-realistic answer, (b) numerical response that does take into account realistic considerations, (c) a realistic solution stating that the task cannot be solved. The hypotheses of this study were: (1) Students’ responses will confirm previous results, i.e. upper elementary school students prefer to respond to P-items by means of the routine-based answer; (2) Most students will demonstrate a more or less consistent preference for a given answer type (a, b or c) over problems; (3) Students’ school math marks will have low correlation indices with students’ achievement on these word problems. Our results confirm student’s overall tendency to follow non-realistic approaches when doing school word problem solving. The tendency even holds when confronting students with various kinds of realistic answers. Our results show that students demonstrate response patterns over problems, and that the correlation with math school performance is significant but small.