The Development of Strategies for Solving Arithmetic Word Problems: Using Keywords or Diagrams?

Solving simple arithmetic word problems is a major ability that children mustacquire while in primary education. Yet, many students struggle with thismaths task. The aim of the present contribution is to give an overview of how toeffectively support problem-solving abilities in school-age children. For manydecades a very popular problem-solving practice has been the keyword strat-egy. By describing difficulties that students encounter with inconsistent lan-guage problems (i.e. problems where the language featured in the problemtext steers the student towards an inappropriate mathematical operation), wehighlight the superficiality and inappropriateness of this approach. In future,practitioners should rather focus on teaching children to integrate the prob-lem’s textual information into an adequate mental representation, which is thebasis for a successful solution strategy. As such, two methods that emphasizethe use of visual representations, such as diagrams, are described.