Intensifying Language Supports in Word-Problem Schema Instruction

Students encounter mathematics word problems as early as kindergarten and continue to see them throughout their schooling experience (National Governors Association Center for Best Practice & Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010). Mathematics word problems involve a mathematics problem embedded within text that students must interpret to solve for an unknown. To succeed in word-problem solving, students must utilize language, calculation, and spatial understanding skills (Garderen, 2006; Wang et al., 2016). Students must also apply mathematics notation, oral language, written language, and visual representations skills. Furthermore, students use background knowledge from both domain-specific language and grammatical patterns (Schleppegrell, 2007). Along with the multiple skills students need to solve a word problem, word-problem features introduce additional complications. Such challenging features include the presence of irrelevant information, position of the unknown, type of problem, vocabulary, and the inclusion of graphs or figures (García et al., 2006; Powell et al., 2009, 2017; Wang et al., 2016). In sum, word-problem solving is a complex undertaking.