Primary School Students' Problem Solving Factorial Research And Development

Word-problem study occupied an important position in the elementary school mathematics study. It was an important and difficult area in the elementary mathematics study. Some researches indicated that most mathematically disabled students all had the difficulty in solving word-problems. Moreover, the difficulty would be more and more serious with the students growing in grades. Therefore, the overall understanding of the development characteristics of pupils' word-problem solving, discovering the differences amang different type students would have important value and meanings to teacher's teaching according to students' ablity.348 students were selected from grade 4-6 of an elementary school as the participants of this research. Field experiment, textual analysis and clinical interviews were employed to examine such questions: the factors which influenced pupils' word-problem solving, the characteristics of their word-problem solving with the students growing in grades, the differences between mathematically gifted and mathematically disabled students when they made mistakes.The main findings of the whole research were as follows:1. The ability of Chinese, mathematical interest, metacognitive and gender were all the factors that influenced the development of pupils' word-problem solving. But the influence didn't mean the direct consequence.2. Gerenally, from the development view, the ability of word-problem solving, the adaptability of difficulty and the understandability of problems were increasing step by step with the students growing in grades. But there still existed differences in individuals and interaction in specific aspect.3. On the use of word-problem representation strategy, the structure representation strategy was seldom used by all the students, but the other threestrategies were used more and it put up significantly differences in strategy using amang grades.4. Mathematically gifted and mathematically disabled students existed differences in test types, question types, adaptability of difficulty, representation strategy, mistake characteristics and grades.