Numbers don't change the situation

The coordinator of first year Chemistry had a chat to me the other day about how to support students in solving word problems. The issue is that students have trouble using the words to help them decide what sorts of calculations need to be done in order to solve the problem. This issue is not new – people have been solving word problems for thousands of years, and the maths education literature is littered with papers discussing the issue. No clear concensus has been reached, of course, because there are any number of factors that affect students' ability to solve problems.

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