Strategies to make word problems easy for the students at primary level

The web of word problems:

From a students perspective, word problems are no less than world problems. Over the years, students have become accustomed to turning a blind eye towards any kind of word problem, mainly because it has tricky language and takes a lot of time to fully understand how to solve.

Word Problems are crucial as they put the student’s understanding of the concept to test. These problems not only serve as an assessment or diagnostic tools for the teacher but also have a great impact in improving higher order thinking skills of the students

Here are few obstacles faced by students in decoding word problems and the strategies to assist them in conquering it

How will the three approaches help?

1)Following the decontextualizing approach and asking students to identify and interpret  the keywords before working out the solution will help the students to assess what they need to find.

2)When no keywords are mentioned, following the visualization approach, each student can be encouraged to develop their strategy to truly understand the fundamentals of problem-solving by drawing the problem out.

 3)Following the Analyze approach when a lot of numerical information is given, it is best to go ahead by helping students to slow down & analyze the problem itself without focusing on the numbers.

All Icon by nawicon, Nhor Phai and Euclap from flaticon.com

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