The effects of instructional context and reasoning complexity on mathematics problem-solving

The focus of this study was on the effects of relevance in instructional context and reasoning complexity on mathematics problem-solving achievement, transfer, and attitude. Forty-six fifth graders participated in the five-day study. Students received either contextualized or decontextualized instruction involving either simple or complex reasoning. Two types of achievement questions were used, context-rich and context-poor, which required either single or multiple computational steps to solve. An interaction was found between complexity of treatment and complexity of questions. Students who studied simple problems in decontextualized contexts performed best on one-step questions, while students who studied complex problems in contextualized contexts performed best on multi-step questions (p = .003). A complexity effect was also found for student attitudes toward perceived lesson difficulty (p = .0001) as well as for perceived relevance of mathematics (p = .015). Students who studied simple problems perceived lesson difficulty and mathematics relevance more favorably than those who studied complex problems. These findings suggest that rich mathematical instructional contexts best support mathematics problem-solving, but simple, decontextualized instruction yields the most favorable attitudes.