Unit 13:
Word problems in mathematics:
identifying key terms and making
connections
Teacher Education
through School-based
Support in India
www.TESS-India.edu.in
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The TESS-India project (Teacher Education through School-based Support) aims to improve
the classroom practices of elementary and secondary teachers in India through studentcentred and activity-based approaches. This has been realised through 105 teacher
development units (TDUs) available online and downloaded in printed form.
Teachers are encouraged to read the whole TDU and try out the activities in their classroom
in order to maximise their learning and enhance their practice. The TDUs are written in a
supportive manner, with a narrative that helps to establish the context and principles that
underpin the activities. The activities are written for the teacher rather than the student,
acting as a companion to textbooks.
TESS-India TDUs were co-written by Indian authors and UK subject leads to address Indian
curriculum and pedagogic targets and contexts. Originally written in English, the TDUs have
then been localised to ensure that they have relevance and resonance in each participating
Indian states context.
TESS-India is led by The Open University and funded by UKAID from the Department for
International Development.
Version 1.0
Except for third party materials and otherwise stated, this content is made available under a
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Contents
Introduction
Learning outcomes
Summary
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Resources
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16
10
References
17
Acknowledgements
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Introduction
Introduction
Students can nd understanding how to work with word problems hard to
do. They can become distracted by the narrative, which can seem to be
based in real life, but at the same time they seem a bit unbelievable. For
example, if 82 people are waiting for a lift that can only take nine people at
a time in a real ofce block, then at least one person, and probably several
more, will choose to walk up rather than wait.
However, in a mathematics word problem, such aspects of real life are
usually not considered relevant. Hence sometimes students need to be helped
to consider what is part of the context that is relevant to the mathematics
and what is not in other words, to pay attention to what is important and
to disregard what is there as a distraction. Perhaps students need a set of
tools to make sense of word problems, to notice where the mathematics is
and to be aware that word problems are a case of modelling mathematical
ideas.
Word problems are usually an example of mathematical modelling. It may be
important to remind the students that this is how much mathematics is used
in careers beyond school: to model what happens (or may happen) in the
world so that complex situations and often awkward numbers can be
manipulated more simply and solutions to problems found. Students can
become aware of this by decoding word problems, and also by making up
word problems themselves.
In this unit, you are invited to rst undertake the activities for yourself, and
reect on the experience; then try them out in your classroom, and reect on
that experience. Trying for yourself will mean you get insights into a
learners experiences, which can in turn inuence your teaching and your
experiences as a teacher. This will help you to develop a more learnerfocused teaching environment.
The activities in this unit require you to work on mathematical problems
either alone or with your class. First you will read about a mathematical
approach or method; then you will apply it in the activity, solving a given
problem. Afterwards you will be able to read a commentary by another
teacher who did the same activity with a group of students so you can
evaluate its effectiveness and compare with your own experience.
Many of the word problems used in this unit have been adapted from word
problems in the NCERT textbooks for Class IX and X.
TDU 13
Learning outcomes
After studying this unit, you should be able to:
.
teach your students how to make sense of the mathematics in the context
of the word problem
The learning in this unit links to the NCFTE (2005, 2009) teaching
requirements specied in Resource 1.
The next task focuses on helping you train your mind to spot relevant
information and then to work at chunking the word problems into smaller
pieces of information.
TDU 13
1 A square garden has a walking track that is eight feet wide along
its sides. If one side of the garden is ten metres long, nd the
distance travelled by Hamid if he walks around the garden twice.
2 Kavita was given some money on her 16th birthday by her uncle.
She used the money to buy two pairs of jeans for Rs. 950 each
from a store that was offering a 20 per cent discount. After the
purchase, she still had Rs. 150 left. How much money did her
uncle give her?
3 Rita buys 3 kg of mangos and 12 bananas for Rs. 280 on
Tuesday. Three days later, from the same shop, Rahul buys 2 kg
of mangos and 18 bananas for Rs. 300. Write the equations that
can help nd the cost of 1 kg of mangos and a dozen bananas.
Based on what you did, answer these questions:
1 For each key word or phrase you think is useful, provide your
reason why. Also, provide a reason for not using any information
that you disregarded.
2 What helped you decide which numerical data was useful and
which was not? Did you miss any useful information?
3 Was there some information that you found difcult to classify as
useful or not useful? How did you go about accepting or
rejecting this information? Why was this information difcult to
classify? What additional information about these could have
helped you decide better?
4 What did you nd easy or difcult about chunking a word problem
into smaller pieces of information? Why was chunking some
information easy while the other difcult?
5 Did you visualise any of the above problems before identifying key
words or chunking? How was visualising helpful?
recognise what is the context and what is important for solving the
mathematics
give the answer in a way that relates it to the problem asked for
example using appropriate units of measurement.
I then asked the class to look at the problems in Activity 1. They wanted
just to answer the problems, but I wanted them to think about the
process and use the problem solving skills we had come up with. So I
asked them to look at the second question together. When solving word
problems, it is important to rephrase the critical information in your own
language mathematically, if possible. For example, let us look at the
following word problem from the previous task.
Kavita was given some money on her 16th birthday by her uncle.
She used the money to buy two pairs of jeans for Rs. 950 each
from a store that was offering a 20 per cent discount. After the
purchase, she still had Rs. 150 left. How much money did her uncle
give her?
Each pair of jeans cost Rs. 950. So she spent 2 950 = Rs. 1900.
TDU 13
Once we had done this, the students tackled the other two word
problems in the same way, chunking them and trying to write down the
mathematical expressions for what they were doing. They realised fairly
soon that to answer the rst question they needed to know where
Hassan was walking on the path, and that the measurements were in
feet and metres, so some conversion would be needed. The third
question also resulted in some heated debate over whether it mattered
that the two visits to the shop were three days apart, so we denitely
tackled the question of irrelevant information and how difcult
constructing such problems could be.
I then sent the students off to have some fun devising word problems of
their own that contained some good mathematics and some irrelevant
information that was not obvious.
If you have 30 students in your class, you will need 15 pairs of cards.
Randomly distribute the cards to the students. Each student has to nd
the student who has the card that completes his or her pair.
Part B
For each equation write as many context-based word problems as you
can. For example, for the equation y = 3x you could write Kavitas feet
are three times as long as her baby brothers.
Here are some examples of equations:
.
y = 3x
x + y = 150
3x y = 22
2x + 3y = 88
TDU 13
A = 16p
32 = x(y + 2)
For which equations was writing word problems more difcult than
others? Why do you think these were difcult?
For each equation, which one of your word problems was most realistic?
Why? Can you try to make the other word problems more realistic?
TDU 13
3 Modelling a context
mathematically
Identifying the mathematical ideas that will be needed to solve word
problems, or modelling the context mathematically, can be difcult for
students. The word problems they encounter in textbooks usually only need
the mathematics that has just been studied so thinking about what
mathematics is needed to model the situation is seldom required, except in
examinations. The next exercise focuses on thinking about what mathematics
is needed and how to express the problem in a way that the mathematics can
be used to solve the problem.
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TDU 13
It takes three men six hours to dig a ditch. How long does it take two
men to dig the same ditch? (Traditional)
Suppose a scribe says to thee, four overseers have drawn 100 great
quadruple hekat of grain, their gangs consisting, respectively, of 12,
eight, six and four men. How much does each overseer receive? (Problem
68, Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, c. 1700 BCE)
The style that these problems are written in makes them unlikely to be
mistaken for anything other than word problems, and you probably can
make sense of the mathematics without understanding the context. The
context is not in itself important in many word problems. This can even be
true when the context tries harder to be relevant
Suppose you read the following word problem: Sally made 32 cakes. One
eighth of them were chocolate; how many were not? What responses or
reactions might be possible other than just trying to work it out? Someone
might reasonably ask: Why might I want to know this? or Is it plausible
in my experience?, or even Can I imagine myself asking such a question
outside a mathematics classroom?
Word problems are often essentially mathematical problems dressed up in
everyday language, but they are there to help students understand that
mathematics can model the real world and they can act like mathematicians
when they do this. This is why it is important that students begin to realise
the power of mathematics in real-world problems is about its ability to
model complex situations and extract the essential elements from them.
Focusing on the process of making sense of a complex situation and
modelling it mathematically can also help students focus on the making
sense aspect of word problems. Activity 4 also looks at how to help
students know how to nd out what they need to know more independently.
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TDU 13
After everyone had done some thinking, we shared ideas about what we
could use to nd out about the ideas. They rst said, Ask the teacher,
but I banned that for this exercise and asked them to be more
imaginative. One said, Use the internet, another Look it up in the
textbook, so I suggested that they look up what they could in their
textbooks and that if they brought me a note of anything they couldnt
nd, I would be their internet search engine for today! I made sure to be
awkward and only give information on what was actually entered in the
search bar in order to make them think about what they really needed
to know.
Once everyone felt they had the information they needed, they went
onto the rephrasing exercise. It seemed that this was easy now because
the class were working collaboratively and learning together by this
time.
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5 Summary
5 Summary
This unit has concerned learning to work with word problems in their widest
sense. It has discussed the relationship between contexts and the
mathematics that can model that context. The suggestion is that focusing on
the process of moving from words to algebra and vice versa will enable
students to understand that the world can be modelled by mathematics. This
is important because when mathematics is used in real life, it is used to
allow complex problems to be simplied and worked with so that solutions
can be suggested with condence.
Working with word problems can give meaning to mathematics that is based
in the students personal experience and therefore can make them active
participants in their own learning as they use mathematics to model their
own situations.
Identify three approaches have you learned from this unit that you might use
in your classroom and two ideas that you want to explore further.
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TDU 13
6 Resources
Resource 1: NCF/NCFTE teaching
requirements
This unit links to the following teaching requirements of the NCF (2005)
and NCFTE (2009), and will help you to meet those requirements:
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View learners as active participants in their own learning and not as mere
recipients of knowledge; to encourage their capacity to construct
knowledge; to ensure that learning shifts away from rote methods.
References
References
Black, P., Harrison, C., Lee, C., Marshall, B. and Wiliam, D. (2003) Assessment
for Learning: Putting it into Practice. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press.
National Council of Educational Research and Training (2005) National
Curriculum Framework (NCF). New Delhi: NCERT.
National Council for Teacher Education (2009) National Curriculum Framework
for Teacher Education [Online], New Delhi, NCTE. Available at http://www.
ncte-india.org/publicnotice/NCFTE_2010.pdf (Accessed 16 January 2014).
National Council of Educational Research and Training (2012a) Mathematics
Textbook for Class IX. New Delhi: NCERT.
National Council of Educational Research and Training (2012b) Mathematics
Textbook for Class X. New Delhi: NCERT.
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TDU 13
Acknowledgements
The content of this teacher development unit was developed collaboratively
and incrementally by the following educators and academics from India and
The Open University (UK) who discussed various drafts, including the
feedback from Indian and UK critical readers: Els De Geest, Anjali Gupte,
Clare Lee and Atul Nischal.
Except for third party materials and otherwise stated, this content is made
available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence:
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The material acknowledged below is Proprietary and used under licence (not
subject to Creative Commons Licence). Grateful acknowledgement is made
to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this unit:
Problem solving: almagami/iStockphoto.com.
Jeans: Chris Rubber Dragon/iStockphoto.com.
Activity 3: Nikhil Gangavane | Dreamstime.com.
Activity 4: Andrew Turner/Flickr made available under Creative
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2.0/deed.en.
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