College Students and Algebra Story Problems: Strategies for Identifying Relevant Information

College students' strategies to discriminate relevant from irrelevant information in algebra story problems were identified and compared to strategies used by younger students in previous studies. College students identified numbers relevant for solution (Experiment 1) or provided verbal reports as they computed answers (Experiment 2). Type of information examined, sequence and duration of examination, and verbal reports were analyzed. College students' strategies were similar to those of younger students (using specific semantic features, using the question, discriminating during reading, rereading, transitional strategies). Students used multiple strategies across problems. Multiple strategies within a single problem occurred more frequently on problems with transitional strategies. An exploratory analysis indicated that students were aware of their strategies and consistently monitored and evaluated their strategic processing.

Acknowledgement

The author wishes to thank Nathan Hipp, Julie Globokar, Autumn Durocher, Erika Werner and Jessi Johnson Porter for their help in this project.

Notes

^a The term “look” here is used to indicate striking a key to open and examine a block of information in the problem text.

^b Includes only problems that had at least one look to the question during discrimination. This was computed as the average across subjects of: