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1-124 - How Shall I Solve This Problem? Modeling and Stimulating Strategy Use in Mathematics

Thu, March 19, 2:10 to 3:40pm, Penn CC, Floor: 200 Level, Room 204A

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

When investigating children’s development, for example in the domain of mathematics, it is important to consider the strategies they use, and not focus only on their performance on various tasks. The strategies and approaches that children use are at least as informative. In the present symposium we present three studies using different approaches to investigate children’s strategy use in mathematical problem solving.

Paper 1 focuses on modeling strategy development using the overlapping waves metaphor. A statistical model developed in the context of Item Response Theory in combination with Latent Growth Modeling nicely fitted the shifting use of strategies over a two-month period when children were learning single digit multiplication. While this paper is largely descriptive, papers 2 and 3 analyzed how children’s strategy use can be changed, thus showing insights in how optimal strategy selection and generation can be stimulated. In paper 2, it was shown how task characteristics, such as the time between different math problems, influence the strategies that children apply. In paper 3 it was also investigated how task characteristics influence children’s strategy choices, but here it was investigated how the use of color in the problem and the presence of feedback stimulated children to generate the correct strategy to solve problems.

Together, the studies give more insight in how children develop their strategies and how to foster this development.

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