The Influence of Visual Representations and Context on Mathematical Word Problem Solving

The aim of this study is to explore problem solving performance of fifth graders on mathematical word problems in familiar and unfamiliar context with or without visual representations. 867 fifth graders in turkish republic of northern cyprus were the participants. the participants sat, on a voluntary basis, for a 30 item multiple choice test in which there were 6 operation items and 24 result-unknown type of word problems. all the participants answered the same questions under the same conditions and scored in the same manner. one-way repeated measures anova results showed that the students showed better performances when solving familiar word problems than solving comparable unfamiliar word problems. the results also showed that the presence of visual representations in word problems strongly influenced students’ problem solving performances in a positive way. it was observed that visual representations contributed a lot especially when the context of the word problems was unfamiliar.