The Effects of Teaching Schematic Drawing on Mathematical Problem-Solving Performance of Third Grade Students

[[abstract]]The purpose of this study is to design a schematic drawing training program for 3th grade students and to investigate its immediate and tracking effects on students’ problem-solving performance on “changed and compared” word problems. Also, it focuses on the situation of student’s generating problem schema and representation. 60 students from an elementary school were as subjects, 30 students for experimental group and control group. Students in the experimental group went through schematic drawing training program, while those in the control group didn’t. The quantitative instrument utilized to examine the effcts of the training is“Addition and Subtraction Word Problem Achievement Test”, which was administered at the end of the training and 2 weeks later for tracking. The collected data were analyzed with one-way ANCOVA. The other data including “problem schema sorting tasks”, “schematic drawing tasks”, “learning questionnaire of schematic drawing”, and “teacher’s reflective journals” were also analyzed to examine the effects of the training. The findings were presented as follows: 1.Schematic drawing training program could improve the performance of problem-solving for addition and subtraction word problems.for example, (1) The experimental program could immediately improve the performance of problem-solving for addition and subtraction word problems. (2) The experimental program could maintain the improvement in problem-solving for addition and subtraction word problems.2.Experimental group could generate problem schema of addition and subtraction word problems and classify the problems according to the schema.3.Experimental group could generate suitable schematic drawing of addition and subtraction word problems.4.Experimental group have positive opinions on schematic drawing. Finally, based on the experimental results, we propose suggestions for education of mathematical problem-solving and future research.