The Word Problem Factor: Assessing the Ability of Utah High School Career and Technical Education Students to Do the Math Involved in Formulating and Calculating Energy Cost Factors

• Main Author: Bentley, Kristen
• Format: Others
• Published: BYU ScholarsArchive 2014
• Subjects: word problems; story problems; math; numeracy; high school; energy costs; financial literacy; Educational Methods; Science and Mathematics Education
• Online Access: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/4341; https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5340&context=etd

Much research has been done showing the difficulty people have with word problems. This has been shown to be true for many types of word problems and for different demographics. Questions have remained unanswered regarding the reasons for this difficulty. It has been unclear if the word problems were hard because the people had forgotten or had not yet learned how to do the math calculations involved or for some other reason. This study deals with high school students who are currently in a high school level math class. They were given an assessment involving word problems and number-only problems. The results demonstrate that these students can do the math calculations needed for the problems but that the difficulty lies in their ability to formulate the word problems into correct mathematical expressions. Among the students in math classes higher than Secondary 2, it cannot be shown that those who have passed Financial Literacy demonstrate a significantly higher ability to do word problems with p > 0.05.