Abstract
The issue of how teaching strategies inform students’ approaches to solving word problems has been, and still remains, the focus of attention in mathematics education. In this book chapter, we outline a rationale for the Equilibrated Development Approach (EDA) to word problem solving and provide its principles and epistemological stance. The EDA is informed by and critically engages with the tenets of sociocultural theory, the Vygotskian paradigm for learning, and Davydov’s and Galperin’s theoretical and empirical work (Vygotsky LS, Educational psychology. St. Lucie Press, Boca Raton, 1997; Davydov VV, Problems of developmental instruction: a theoretical and experimental psychological study. Nova Science Publishers, Hauppauge, 2008; Galperin P, Georgiev L, The formation of elementary mathematical notions. Soviet Stud Psychol Learn Teach Math 1:189–216, 1969). For a decade now, we have used the EDA to construct, refine, and gradually implement new ways of teaching problem solving. We share examples of original teaching-learning activities fostering students’ mathematical thinking and sense making in solving word problems. We also share examples from our classroom observations to suggest alternative teaching strategies in elementary mathematics. The purpose of our work is to surface processes of understanding quantitative relationships and to shed light on the role they play in one’s capacity-building in solving word problems. In this chapter, we discuss our work within the intersection point of mathematics education, educational psychology, learning theories, and studies in neuro-education to demonstrate how the EDA approach coalesces insights garnered from these diverse study areas to constitute an innovative way of teaching word-problem solving in elementary school.
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Notes
- 1.
See Polotskaia and Savard (2018) for quantitative and qualitative analyses of evidence from the experimental and control groups.
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The research projects discussed in this chapter were funded by the Quebec ministry of éducation (“Chantier 7” funding opportunity 2012 and 2015).
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Polotskaia, E., Savard, A., Fellus, O., Freiman, V. (2023). Equilibrated Development Approach to Word Problem Solving in Elementary Grades: Fostering Relational Thinking. In: Robinson, K.M., Kotsopoulos, D., Dubé, A.K. (eds) Mathematical Teaching and Learning. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31848-1_3
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