Student Written Word Problems.

 

There are reasons to have students write word problems.  Many of the problems that are found on the internet or in textbooks are not easy for my students to relate to.  For instance, anything involving a car and traveling from Los Angles to Seattle make no sense to my students because there are only one or two in town and you can't drive very far with one.  I think you can go eight miles to the new school and that is it.  Problems of that sort need to be rewritten using snow machines or all terrain vehicles.  Even problems with school buses do not work well unless there is one in town.

One reason to have students write their own word problems is that it gives the teacher a way to see if they understand the concept. In addition, it gives students a chance to create a real world application of the mathematical concept.  For instance, if students are learning about unit prices, they could write problems about shopping in the store and comparing two items to determine which is the better purchase.  Furthermore, writing word problems requires students to develop higher level critical thinking skills.  

When students write word problems, they write them with an idea of how they would solve the problem and if there is more than one method involved, they will think about which method might be better.  Writing word problems help students connect the mathematical concept with their background knowledge and with their own life's experience. 

One piece of research showed that although there was no indication of growth of students ability to write better and better word problems, there was a recordable change of attitude towards word problems. Furthermore, students who could solve an equation in standard form had difficulty with the same information when it was in a word problem. Once students began writing their own word problems, they started seeing a better connection between the equations and word problems. In addition, it also helped decrease student anxiety towards completing word problems. 

For the actual process, it is best to give students the answer or a few numbers to use in their word problem.    The answer might include variables such as x^2 + 4x + 4 or it might be 28 or you might give them numbers such as 3, 5, X.  You might even go so far as to tell them you want them to write a problem that uses multiplication and has an answer of 36.  

The majority of word problems usually involve a certain number of people who are doing something.  With this in mind, students choose the characters and what they are doing.  Usually, the characters are doing something like traveling, sharing things, buying something, deciding what happens if they add a foot to one set of wall or subtract a foot from the other set. 

So for an example, I might give my middle school students 45, 3, each and uses division.  So I have the parameters of the problem.  Since there is a 3, I might decide to have 3 friends, Joe, Mabel, and Frank.  Since I have to use division, it usually means they are sharing something so maybe there is a pile of 45 pieces of candy.  I have to use the word each, so if they are dividing the candy, I'd want to know how many pieces each person got.  

The final problem might read. Three friends,  Joe, Mabel, and Frank ,have a pile of 45 pieces of candy.  They want to share it equally among them.  How many pieces will each person get?

This is not something students can do one time and be experts.  It is going to take time for them to learn to write their own problems and it is not an easy process.  You should acknowledge that it will take time to learn to do this and that it can be difficult but with practice, it becomes easier. In addition, it should be taught, retaught, and taught again but over the span of weeks so students have an opportunity to get the understanding of the structure of word problems.

This is a good way to help students become less fearful of word problems and connect the words with the equations.  Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.  Have a great day.