Pre-service teachersʹ conceptions and beliefs about the role of real-world knowledge in mathematical modelling of school word problems

Recent research has documented that many pupils show a strong tendency to exclude real-world knowledge from their solutions of school arithmetic word problems. In the present study, a test consisting of 14 word problems—half of which were problematic from a realistic point of view—was administered to a large group of students from three different teacher training institutes in Flanders. For each word problem, the student-teachers were first asked to solve the problem themselves, and afterwards to evaluate four different answers given by pupils. The results revealed a strong tendency among student-teachers to exclude real-world knowledge from their own spontaneous solutions of school word problems as well as from their appreciations of the pupilsʹ answers.