In a study in Education Psychology Review, researchers at the University of Helsinki, Finland, explored factors that influence the relationship between pictures and students' performance in solving math word problems in elementary school students. They aimed to understand the impact of problem difficulty (i.e. task characteristics) alongside the skills and motivation of the students (i.e. student characteristics).
While previous reviews and meta-analyses included "task difficulty" as a factor, many only defined the characteristics based on the authors’ perception of tasks being “difficult” or “easy” rather than specific task elements (such as required operations, position of the unknown, etc.). In this study, the researchers took a more nuanced approach, separating task characteristics into two categories: linguistic (e.g., position of the unknown, lexical consistency, irrelevant information) and numerical (e.g., number of operations, required operations, type of numbers). They also looked more closely at the types of pictures and compared research that used representational pictures (representing the situation in the word problem), decorative pictures (unrelated to the learning goal of the problem), and informative pictures (showing essential additional information for solving the problem). Finally, they investigated the effects of student characteristics on the potential benefits of pictures, specifically looking at students’ math skills, visuospatial skills and reading comprehension.
They found that representational pictures were generally helpful for easier problems, such as simple addition tasks. Grade level did not appear to be related, as the positive effects were distributed across all elementary school grades. Decorative pictures had no impact on student performance, regardless of the difficulty of the word problem. However, informative pictures negatively impacted performance for all levels of task difficulty, a factor that worsened for students who were already low-performing in general mathematics. Furthermore, when factoring in student characteristics, they found that the low-math students actually performed better on text-only word problems compared to problems with representational pictures. Interestingly, they found the opposite for students who were low-performing in reading comprehension and visuospatial executive functioning: these students performed better with representational pictures compared with text-only word problems.
StepUp Note
Visualization, or “seeing how numbers work,” is a critical part of math problem-solving. The true value of math lies in its ability to help us function as independent learners and independent adults. We need to be able to calculate time and money, along with many other small problems in daily living. StepUp to Learn helps children visualize math in two ways. First, math exercises for subitizing (“seeing” number sets 1 to 10 without counting), builds the math concept of “sets.” Next, math fluency exercises (hear the number, then say and write the next number) helps them visualize the math relationships of “number,” “next number,” “number before,” and “add 2.” Fluency turns skills into tools for new learning. Children who struggle with fluency will struggle to visualize how math works.
Note by Nancy W Rowe, MS, CCC/A