A Situation-based Survey Of Fifth-grade Students' Ability To Pose Mathematical Problems

With the reform of China's education curriculum,the cultivation of creativity in primary and secondary school students has begun to become a focus of concern.The ability to formulate mathematical problems is an important manifestation of creative thinking and has therefore attracted increasing attention from educators.In recent years,research on mathematical problem-solving ability has been enriched and improved,but there is still a lack of research on students' problem-solving ability in different contexts.Based on this,this project focuses on the core question of "the current situation of Grade 5 students' problem-solving ability in mathematics" and develops a questionnaire on Grade 5 students' problem-solving ability in personal,vocational,social,purely mathematical and interdisciplinary contexts in accordance with the Curriculum(2011),and the three indicators of fluency,flexibility and novelty.Constructing an evaluation method for mathematical problem-formulation ability,and finally conducting statistical analysis of the test paper results,the following research conclusions and recommendations were obtained.First,in terms of the overall status: Grade 5 students' ability to formulate mathematical problems is at a low level;in terms of the three indicators,Grade5 students' problem formulation fluency is at an excellent level and flexibility and novelty are at a failing level;in terms of the dimensions of problems,students' ability to formulate complex and novel problems is weak.Second,from the perspective of different contexts: Year 5 students performed better in personal and vocational contexts and less well in social,purely mathematical and interdisciplinary contexts.Specifically for each context: in the personal and vocational contexts,students performed much better than in the other three contexts in terms of fluency and flexibility,but less well in terms of novelty;in the purely mathematical context,students performed the worst in terms of fluency in asking questions,but the best in terms of difficulty and novelty;in the social context,they performed the worst in terms of the extension dimension of asking questions;in the interdisciplinary context,they performed the worst in terms of the solvability dimension,while In the interdisciplinary context,the dimension of solvability was the worst,and the novelty of the questions was also much worse than in the other four contexts.Based on the analysis of the findings,the following recommendations are made to address the problems of the students.Teachers should focus on diversifying the choice of contexts,using personal and professional contexts in teaching to raise awareness of problems,and creating purely mathematical contexts to develop students' creative thinking.Teachers should focus on the integrated and practical components of teaching,and guide students to ask complex and novel mathematical questions in a targeted way in activity lessons.At the same time,different perspectives should be chosen to assess positively the problems posed by students in order to enhance their confidence in asking questions.