Level of Expertise: 5
What is the strategy?
Students use the five step problem solving strategy to enhance their ability to read and solve word problems. In this strategy, students are asked to restate the problem, determine what key information is needed to find an answer, plan the steps for solving the problem, find the answer, and check their answer for reasonableness. This strategy allows students to map out what they need to solve a word problem (Barton & Heidema, 2000).
Why use this strategy?
This strategy scaffolds word problems for students. By using this, my students will be able to effectively map out the key pieces of information in a word problem. This allows students to then work on the computations needed to solve a problem. The five-step word problem strategy would be an effective tool with multiple aspects of this unit, including adding, subtracting, and multiplying decimals, estimating decimals, and comparing decimals (each of these have the potential of being embedded in word problems).
How does it work?
1. My students will be provided with question 66 in the textbook (Charles, Branch-Boyd, Illingworth, Mills, Reeves, & Thompson, 2004, p. 22).
2. I will allow my students to work individually or in partners to fill out the graphic organizer.
3. Students will fill out each step of the graphic organizer, which is a familiar tool to my students. I will remind my students to make sure their plan in part three is based on the needed data found in part two.
4. Students will get together with one other individual student or pairing and compare their answers. They will discuss which computation was needed to solve the problem, and how they figured that out.
Sources Referenced: Charles, Branch-Boyd, Illingworth, Mills, Reeves, & Thompson, 2004; Barton & Heidema, 2000
What does it look like?
See printed copy.
