Primary And Secondary School Mathematics Problems Raised By Cross-cultural Research

In this study, 344 primary school fifth-grade students and 361 junior middle school second ?grade students from Guiyang, Kaili and Tongzi were examined on mathematical problem posing and solving, and they worked individully or cooperatively. The primary school subjects showed significant regional differences on problem posing, but the middle school subjects did not. Both quantity and quality of the problems posed by primary school subjects surpassed the middle school subjects on"posing problems based on given situation". The middle school subjects performed considerably better than the primary school subjects on "creating a problem based on the given problem's mathematical structure"and"solving open - ended tasks" .Because of the deficient in abilities and skills of most of subjects' cooperation, the cooperation, to a certain exte.nl, exerted negative effects on problem posing. The correlativity between the performance on problem posing and solving of the primary school subjects was much higher than that of the middle school subjects.