• Journal of Educational Research in Mathematics
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.267-281
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• 2004

Many students feel the word problems are very difficult. This study analyzes the linguistic and cognitive factors that affect word problem solving so that we help students bring through the difficulty. There are a text base, a situation model, and a real world in the linguistic aspects. Students have a difficulty at the transition from text base to situation model(equation), and make lots of errors at the situation model. In the cognitive aspects, I investigated problem solving schemes, strategies, and complexity level. Students are likely to choose strategy by the contents which teacher instructed, but not by low complexity level, and mix up the amount of sugar and sugar water, and concentration. We can recognize how complex the types of word problems are to solve, which strategies students choose largely, and what errors that students make in the problem solving are.

• Communications of Mathematical Education
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.159-175
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• 2010

In this paper we make a new problem solving model using the principle of the lever. Using the model we solved many word problems related with consistency. We suggest new problem solving method using the lever model and describe some characteristics of the method.

• Journal of the Korean School Mathematics Society
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.433-452
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• 2009

This study investigated the teaching strategies of two exemplary American teachers regarding word problems and their impact on students' ability to both understanding and solving word problems. The teachers commonly explained the background details of the background of the word problems. The explanation motivated the students' mathematical problem solving, helped students understand the word problems clearly, and helped students use various solving strategies. Emphasizing communication, the teachers also provided comfortable atmosphere for students to discuss mathematical ideas with another. The teachers' continuous questions became the energy for students to plan various problem solving strategies and reflect the solutions. Also, this research suggested a complementary model for Polya's problem solving strategies.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.14 no.12
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• pp.1083-1099
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• 2014

The purpose of this study is to analyze that The arithmetic and algebraic word problem solving skill, strategy preference, and assessment ability of elementary preservice teachers is investigated using a statistical methodology. The research findings are as follows. First, elementary preservice teachers demonstrated logical and delicate problem solving behaviors in arithmetic and algebraic word problem solving. And elementary preservice teachers prefer to create a formula and table strategy in problem solving of the arithmetic question. Second, there was meaningful difference in the math and english elementary preservice teachers' appreciations with significant level of 0.05. And there was not meaningful difference in the 1 and 4 grade elementary preservice teachers' appreciations with significant level of ${\alpha}=0.05$. Results of the study suggest that teachers education course need to improve elementary preservice teachers' word problem solving skill, strategy preference, and assessment ability in the arithmetic and algebraic.

• Journal of Educational Research in Mathematics
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.63-80
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• 2009

This paper has a purpose to find out the important points about linguistic factors suited to the assessment purpose and mathematics teaching/learning that a word-problem sentence has to possess. We also examine the degree of understanding of sentence and the perceptive/emotional reactions of students toward two different kinds of word-problem sentences that have same mathematical contents, but different linguistic structures. The objects of this thesis are 124 students from the third to sixth grade in an elementary school. We execute assessment of simple-sentence-word-problem and complex-sentence-word-problem that have same mathematical contexts, but different linguistic structures. Then we have compared and examined their own process of solving the two types word-problems and we make up questionnaire and have an interview with them. The conclusions are as followings: First, simple-sentence-word-problem is more successful to suggest an information for solving a problem than complex one. Second, it is hard to find the strategy for solving a problem in complex-sentence-word-problem than simple one. Third, students think that suggested information and mathematical knowledge are different according to the linguistic structure in the process of perceiving the information after reading a word-problem. Fourth, in spite of same sentence type, the negative mental reaction is showed greatly to complex-sentence-word-problem even before solving a problem.

• Journal of the Korean School Mathematics Society
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.117-132
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• 2008

This paper has analyzed the problem of the inequality unit in 7th National curriculum 8-Ga stage from the following points. First, in respect to the written questions of the inequality unit over every textbook of 7th National curriculum, how are they allocated according to subject matters and what are their weak points? Second. how many of them are related to the authentic daily life or other subjects and what kind of subjects are they? Third, what are the problems related to the authentic daily life situation or what are the problems that have some inter-sentential errors, and what kinds of measures for their improvement can be taken? In keeping with view points above, we have analyzed the contents in current 16 different textbooks on th basis of their subject matters and especially put the emphasis on the relation to daily life and other subjects. Consequently, we found there are many textbooks that do not include various subject matters and that can not be related to various other subjects. It is necessary to connect mathematics to various daily life matters and other subjects to improve students' creativity and to make students understand the practicality of mathematics.

• Education of Primary School Mathematics
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.29-43
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• 2023

The purpose of this study was to synthesize intervention studies, which utilized single case experimental design, on teaching mathematical word problems for elementary school students with disabilities and evaluate each of their methodological rigor. The researchers reviewed all studies from 2000 to 2022 that involved teaching mathematical word problems to individuals with disabilities. A total of 12 studies was included for a final analysis. Most of the interventions were delivered by researchers for about 30-40 minutes per session to elementary school students with disabilities. Schema-based instruction, cognitive-metacognitive strategy, and technology-based instruction were used as intervention methods, and explicit instruction was mostly used in conjunction with them. On the other hand, the researchers found that none of research articles met quality indicators for single case experimental design according to Cook et al. (2015). Limitation and directions for future research were also discussed.

• Journal of Elementary Mathematics Education in Korea
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.717-735
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• 2016

For teaching division-with-remainder(DWR) problems, it is necessary to know students' strategies and errors about DWR problems. The purpose of this study is to investigate and analyze students' strategies and errors of DWR problems and to make some meaningful suggestions for teaching various methods of solving DWR problems. We constructed a test which consists of fifteen DWR problems to investigate students' solving strategies and errors. These problems include mathematical as well as syntactic structures. To apply this test, we selected 177 students from eight elementary schools in various districts of Seoul. The results were analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. The sixth graders' strategies can be classified as follows : Single strategies, Multi strategies and Assistant strategies. They used Division(D) strategy, Multiplication(M) strategy, and Additive Approach(A) strategy as sub-strategies. We noticed that frequently used strategies do not coincide with strategies for their success. While students in middle group used Assistant strategies frequently, students in higher group used Single strategies frequently. The sixth graders' errors can be classified as follows : Formula error(F error), Calculation error(C error), Calculation Product error(P error) and Interpretation error(I error). In this study, there were 4 elements for syntaxes in problems : large number, location of divisor and dividend, divisor size, vocabularies. When students in lower group were solving the problems, F errors appeared most frequently. However, in case of higher group, I errors appeared most frequently. Based on these results, we made some didactical suggestions.

• Education of Primary School Mathematics
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.127-142
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• 2016

The purpose of this study was to examine the students' problem solving ability according to numeric expression and the semantic types of addition and subtraction word problems. For this, a research was to analyze the addition and subtraction calculation ability, word problem solving ability of the selected $2^{nd}$ grade(118) and 3rd grade(109) students. We got the conclusion as follows: When the students took the survey to assess their ability to solve the numerical expression and the word problems, the correct answer rates of the result unknown problems was larger than those of the change unknown problems or the start unknown problems. the correct answer rates of the change add-into situation was larger than those of the part-part-whole situation in the result unknown addition word problems: they often presented in text books. And, in the cases of the result unknown subtraction word problems that often presented in text books, the correct answer rates of the change take-away situation was the largest. It seemed probably because the students frequently experienced similar situations in the textbooks. We know that the formal calculation ability of the students was a precondition for successful word problem solving, but that it was not a sufficient condition for that.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.11 no.8
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• pp.315-324
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• 2022

In this paper, we propose KoEPT, a Transformer-based generative model for automatic math word problems solving. A math word problem written in human language which describes everyday situations in a mathematical form. Math word problem solving requires an artificial intelligence model to understand the implied logic within the problem. Therefore, it is being studied variously across the world to improve the language understanding ability of artificial intelligence. In the case of the Korean language, studies so far have mainly attempted to solve problems by classifying them into templates, but there is a limitation in that these techniques are difficult to apply to datasets with high classification difficulty. To solve this problem, this paper used the KoEPT model which uses 'expression' tokens and pointer networks. To measure the performance of this model, the classification difficulty scores of IL, CC, and ALG514, which are existing Korean mathematical sentence problem datasets, were measured, and then the performance of KoEPT was evaluated using 5-fold cross-validation. For the Korean datasets used for evaluation, KoEPT obtained the state-of-the-art(SOTA) performance with 99.1% in CC, which is comparable to the existing SOTA performance, and 89.3% and 80.5% in IL and ALG514, respectively. In addition, as a result of evaluation, KoEPT showed a relatively improved performance for datasets with high classification difficulty. Through an ablation study, we uncovered that the use of the 'expression' tokens and pointer networks contributed to KoEPT's state of being less affected by classification difficulty while obtaining good performance.