Problem Posing with Third-grade Children: Examining the Complexity of Problems

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate what factors third-grade students took into consideration when posing problems for their peers and how these factors affected the mathematical complexities of the problems. Free and semi-structured problem-posing tasks were given to 27 third-grade students, and the problems they created for their peers were analyzed in terms of their semantic structure and arithmetic complexity. According to the findings of the study, there was a statistically significant difference between the semantic structures of the problems in both tasks created for the more mathematically proficient student, but there was no difference between their arithmetic complexities. In addition, according to the qualitative findings of the study, the magnitude of the numbers, the operation types, the number of operations used, and the interests of the students were taken into consideration in posing problems for students with low and high levels of mathematical ability.

Keywords

• Arithmetic complexity
• Arithmetic operations
• Problem-posing
• Semantic structure
• Word problem

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