Abdelhafid Chadli
ABSTRACT
Problem solving has been the focus of a large number of research studies over the past thirty years. Especially, math multi-step word problems (MSWP) have benefit of a substantial amount of research attention from researchers and academics. MSWP can be solved by diverse strategies depending on the mental representation made by students from the situation described in the text of the problem, but frequently students struggle with MSWP for various reasons including procedural or calculation challenges. Usually, students encounter difficulties in the making plane stage of the solving process. As a result, these students require support in identifying the semantic relations in the problem and organizing information in the problem to facilitate problem translation and solution.
In this paper, we make the first attempt of applying a goal-oriented strategy to help students learn how to solve MSWP. The motivation is that goal concept is considered as a dominant motivational concept. The goal-tree representation may serve to reduce a learner's cognitive processing load and provide mental effort to engage in problem solving. The problem solving process is based on Polya's problem-solving model. The emphasis of using the specific model was on dividing the problem-solving procedure into stages and the concentration on the making plan task.
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- A Goal Oriented Approach for Solving Mathematical Multi-step Word Problems
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