An Analysis of Elementary School Students’ Difficulties in Mathematical Problem Solving

By Prathana Phonapichat, Suwimon Wongwanich, Siridej Sujiva. 2014

215 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract The main purpose of mathematics teaching is to enable students to solve problems in daily life. Unfortunately, according to the latest national test results, most students lack mathematical problem solving skills. This proves to be one of the reasons why overall achievement in mathematics is considered quite low. It also reflects that students have difficulties in comprehending mathematical problems affecting the process of problem-solving. Therefore, in order to allow teachers to establish a proper teaching plan suitable for students’ learning process, this research aims to analyze the difficulties in mathematical problem solving among elementary school students. Samples are divided into two groups, elementary school students and mathematics teachers. Data collection was conducted by structured interview, documentary analysis, and survey tests. Data analysis was conducted by descriptive statistics, and content analysis. The results suggest that there are several difficulties in problem solving, namely 1) Students have difficulties in understanding the keywords appearing in problems, thus cannot interpret them in mathematical sentences. 2) Students are unable to figure out what to assume and what information from the problem is necessary to solving it, 3) Whenever students do not understand the problem, they tend to guess the answer without any thinking process, 4) Students are impatient and do not like to read mathematical problems, and 5) Students do not like to read long problems. Therefore, the results found in this research will lead to the creation and the development of mathematical problem solving diagnostic tests for teachers, in order to improve students’ mathematical problem solving skills.

Subfields: Applied Mathematics, Information Systems, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/861dcede1f9f4df74f63e13dcc41f2d484bc9951

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Citations in the corpus

• THE DIFFICULTIES OF HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS IN SOLVING HIGHER-ORDER THINKING SKILLS PROBLEMS (2018, unknown): “Phonapichat et al. (2014) stated that students dislike long word problems.”
• Investigating Critical Thinking Skill of Junior High School in Solving Mathematical Problem (2019, result): “This finding is in line with the findings of Phonapichat et al. (2014) that students have difficulty understanding the keywords contained in the question, so students are not able to interpret the problem in mathematical form.”