DESCRIBING DIFFERENT STRATEGIES THAT LIE BENEATH TOWARDS SOLVING DIFFERENT FORMS OF WORD PROBLEMS AND DESCRIBING THE ANALYSIS OF STUDENT DIFFICULTIES IN SOLVING MATHEMATICS PROBLEMS IN HAJI MOHAMMAD JAAFAR MAUN KIULAP PRIMARY SCHOOL IN BRUNEI DARUSSALAM

 

Noraini Timbang¹* and Pauline Chin²*

¹Haji Mohammad Jaafar Maun Kiulap Primary School,

Department of Schools, Brunei Darussalam, hnht20@hotmail.com

²Meragang Sixth Form Centre,

Department of Schools, Brunei Darussalam, cikgupauline@gmail.com

*Corresponding authors

 

Abstract

This paper sets out to see how the Mathematics teachers in Haji Mohammad Jaafar Maun Primary School in Brunei Darussalam put literacy and numeracy guidelines for teaching Mathematics into practice.  The study aims to describe different strategies that lie beneath towards solving different forms of word problems and describe the analysis of student difficulties in solving Mathematics problems. The research instruments used a school-based assessment (SAT); this included an evaluation of the students’ work and interviews from students and teachers. The participants were lower and upper primary students of the academic year 2019 from Year 1 to Year 5 which amounted to 135 people; the teachers were eight Literacy and Numeracy teachers. The results showed that the student difficulties were mostly understanding knowledge in real-life contexts and understanding appropriate mathematical language through open-ended questions. The different strategies used are (1) giving real-life examples, (2) question-answer technique, (3) peer learning technique and (4) activities and games. And student difficulties in solving Mathematics problems are (1) reading text difficulties (2) unfamiliar contexts in problems, and (3) using inappropriate strategies.

Keywords: mathematics pedagogy, word problems, primary students, mathematical language, school-based assessment, vocabulary