A Reading Comprehension Perspective

on Problem Solving
Magnus Osterholm
Linkoping University

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to discuss the bi-directional relationship between
reading comprehension and problem solving, i.e. how reading comprehension can af-
fect and become an integral part of problem solving, and how it can be affected by the
mathematical text content or by the mathematical situation when the text is read. Based
on theories of reading comprehension and a literature review it is found that the rela-
tionship under study is complex and that the reading process can affect as well as act as
an integral part of the problem solving proceh but also that not much research has
focused on this relationship.

Introduction
All over the world, textbooks seem to play an important role in mathematics edu-
cation at all levels (Foxman, 1999), and thereby students' reading activity and
reading comprehension also play important roles. However, the reading activity
can be of different kinds, for example, reading an expository text that tries to ex-
plain something to the reader or reading a problem text in order to attempt to
solve the given problem. This paper focuses on the second type of reading situa-
tion; reading comprehension when trying to solve a given problem. It seems like
most research in mathematics education about reading comprehension has been
done in a manner that reduces reading to a potential obstacle for learning (Borasi
& Siegel, 1990), for example, by focusing on how limitations in reading ability
affect learning in mathematics or on readers' misunderstandings of a written task
and how this can influence the solving of the task. This paper is an attempt to
start from a more nuanced view of reading comprehension, and analyze problem
solving from this perspective.

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is not merely to add a detailed view of reading com-
prehension as an important component of a problem-solving situation, but to dis-
cuss the bi-directional relationship between reading comprehension and problem
solving. Therefore, the purpose of this paper consists of two parts:
A. To theorize about how reading comprehension can affect problem
solving and how reading comprehension can be added as an integral
part of problem solving.

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B. To analyze how reading comprehension can be affected by the mathe-

matical text content or by the mathematical situation when the text is
read. In this paper, the problem-solving situation is the particular type
of mathematical situation that will be studied.

Method and strnctnre of the paper

Theories of reading comprehension will be the starting point in this paper (in
section 2), that is, these theories will be used as theoretical tools when discussing
the relationships between reading comprehension and problem solving. However,
the two parts of the purpose will be handled differently, where the theorizing in
part A will be done in a more unrestricted and exploratory way (in section 3),
while the analysis in part B will be done with the help of a literature survey (in
section 4). The main purpose of this survey is not to find and describe all possi-
bly relevant references, but to find some references (of course as many as possi-
ble) that are highly relevant for part B of the purpose of this paper, in order to
discuss these references from a reading comprehension perspective. A descrip-
tion of the literature survey follows.
The seru:ch for literature was made in two different ways. First, databases
were used to search for references containing (part ot) words such as 'problem
solving', 'reading', 'semantics', and 'linguistic' in relevant combinations. This
search was made in order to find literature that specifically deals with a relation-
ship between problem solving and reading comprehension. Second, a less spe-
cific search was performed, for studies dealing with word problems. This second
type of search for literature was made in order to find such references that poten-
tially could be relevant for the purpose of this paper, without explicitly dealing
with a relationship between reading comprehension and problem solving. There
are two reasons for focusing on word problems. Firstly, a more general search for
problem solving, and not specifically word problems, was presumed to yield too
many irrelevant references. Secondly, a literature survey by Osterholm (2004,
section 3.1) found that word problems were often discussed in literature that fo-
cuses o~ texts and reading in mathematics.
A general search in the MathDi database! (using 'basic index') for references
dealing with word problems gave 1424 results2 • This number had to be reduced
in order to be able to complete this task in a reasonable time. Therefore, it was
chosen to limit the search to the titles of references (to get references that more
directly focus on word problems) and to only include those published in journals
(to ensure generally high quality). This resulted in 199 references, and all these

! http://www.emis.deIMATHlDV
2 All mentioned searches in MathDi were performed on 6 September 2005 and were limited to
references in English. The search words used were 'word prob!*', which resulted in references
including 'word problem' or 'word problems' that were published in the years 1976-2005.

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were included when the abstracts were analyzed. More details of this analysis
and the results from it can be found in section 4 of this paper.

Theories of reading comprehension

Mental representations
When reading a text, a mental representation of the text is created by the reader,
which describes how the reader understands the text. Many studies about reading
comprehension show, or support the conclusion, that "multiple levels of repre-
sentation are involved in making meaning" (van Oostendorp & Goldman, 1998,
p. viii). In particular, the work of Walter Kintsch (e.g., see Kintsch, 1992, 1998)
seems to have had a great influence on research on reading comprehension
(Weaver, Mannes, & Fletcher, 1995). Kintsch (1998) distinguishes between three
different levels, or components, of the mental representation created when read-
ing a text: the surface component, the textbase, and the situation model.
When the words and phrases themselves are encoded in the mental represen-
tation (possibly together with linguistic relations between them), and not the
meaning of the words and phrases, one can talk about a surface component of the
mental representation.
The textbase represents the meaning of the text, that is, the semantic structure
of the text, and it "consists of those elements and relations that are directly de-
rived from the text itself [ ...] without adding anything that is not explicitly speci-
fied in the text" (Kintsch, 1998, p. 103). Since the textbase consists of the mean-
ing of the text and the same meaning can be expressed in different ways, a text-
base can be created without any memory of the exact words or phrases from the
text.
A pure textbase can be "impoverished and often even incoherent" (Kintsch,
1998, p. 103), and to make more sense of the text, the reader uses prior know-
ledge to create a more complete and coherent mental representation. A construc-
tion that integrates the textbase and relevant aspects of the reader's knowledge is
called the situation model. Of course, some prior knowledge is also needed to
create a textbase, but this knowledge is of a more general kind that is needed to
"decode" texts in general, while the prior knowledge referred to in the creation of
a situation model is more specific with respect to the content of the text.

i
j'
Content literacy
As defined by McKenna and Robinson (1990), content literacy refers to the abil-
ity to read, understand and learn from texts from a specific subject area. They
also distinguish between three components of content literacy: general literacy
skills, content-specific literacy skills, and prior knowledge of content. Both the
general and the content-specific literacy skills can be assumed to refer to some
more general type of knowledge that is not dependent on the detailed content of a

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specific text. This type of knowledge is primarily used to create a textbase in the
mental representation. The third component, prior knowledge of content, refers to
knowledge that is connected to the content of a specific text, and is thus primarily
used to create a situation model in the mental representation.
It is not clear to what extent mathematics in itself creates a need for content-
specific literacy skills and how much of reading comprehension in mathematics
depends on more general literacy skills and prior knowledge. However, the sym-
bolic language used in mathematics seems to be a potential cause for the need of
content-specific literacy skills. Also, in a study by Osterholm (2006), compre-
hension of one mathematical text not using mathematical symbols (Le., written in
a natural language) mainly depended on the use of more general literacy skills.

Cognitive processes
Thinking about one's own reading process it seems clear that a skilled reader
usually does not need to actively think very much to create a mental representa-
tion when reading. The use of syntactic and semantic rules together with the acti-
vation of more specific prior knowledge thus happens quite automatically, on a
more unconscious level. In general, different cognitive processes can be more or
less conscious. Perception can refer to highly automatic and unconscious pro-
cesses, for example when you see a dog and directly recognize it as a dog; you
are aware of the result of the process (that you see a dog) but no active and con-
scious thought processes were needed for this recognition. Problem solving on
the other hand can be said to deal with active thinking, a more resource demand-'
ing process, for example when trying to remember the name of a person you
meet and recognize. Thus, when reading a text without experiencing any diffi-
culties in understanding what you read, the process has more in common with
perception than with problem solving, in that the process of understanding is
mainly unconscious. This is a situation representative for Kintsch's (1998) con-
cept of comprehension, which "is located somewhere along that continuum be-
tween perception and problem solving" (Kintsch, 1992, p. 144).

Problem solving and reading comprehension

Problems that need to be solved can arise in different ways, but here focus is on
given problems with a specific question, in particular mathematics problems
given in writing. Specific theories about the problem-solving process sometimes
include the reading of the problem text as an important part (e.g., see P6lya,
1990), which seems natural since one surely needs to start by reading the given
problem text in order to try to understand the problem. Thereby, a mental repre-
sentation of the text is created, that is, a mental representation of the problem is
created. But in order not to limit the description of the result of this reading
process to that the reader either has understood the text or not, and what kind of
(negative) effects this might have on the solution process, a more integrated view

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is suggested of (1) reading the problem, (2) understanding the problem, and (3)
solving the problem.
It seems quite obvious that deficiencies in literacy skills, general or content
specific, can affect the attempt to solve a given problem, since direct reading er-
rors (i.e., problems in creating a textbase) increase the risk that the mental repre-
sentation contradicts the text. However, the mental representation created in the
reading process does not only serve as background to solving the problem, but
the solving process has already started, since also prior knowledge is activated in
the reading process, including more specific types of prior knowledge that can be
suitable for solving the problem, that is, the comprehension of the problem need
not only consist of a pure textbase in the mental representation but also a situa-
tion model can be created. It could even be the case that the problem in principle
has been solved through the reading process (or at least the problem is believed
to be solved). In such a case, the problem is solved using mainly unconscious
cognitive processes, that is, the problem is solved through pure comprehension
(Kintsch, 1998) of the problem/situation. Davis (1984, p. 207) gives an empirical
example of this type of solution by comprehension, where an existing mental
representation of a similar problem was activated, and the person "had done this
unconsciously, but had been able to reconstruct some of the process by deter-
mined introspection afterwards." Thus, this is not only a theoretical possibility,
and it has also been shown that these types of unconscious comprehension
processes can be used to explain behavior in such situations as action planning
(Mannes & Kintsch, 1991) and decision making (Kitajima & Polson, 1995). Per-
haps some observed student behavior when solving problems also can be ex-
plained by assuming that the student is relying mostly on these types of compre-
hension processes when trying to solve the problem, for example, when Lithner
(2000, p. 165) reports that "focusing on what is familiar and remembered at a
superficial level is dominant over reasoning based on mathematical properties of
the components involved."
To generate the answer to the posed question in a given problem can be seen
as a natural goal of the situation, and in order to reach that goal one needs to
regulate one's behavior, that is, self-regulating processes are active. The given
question can thus play a very important role also in the creation of the mental
representation in the reading process since it can influence what kind of prior
knowledge is activated, that is, the self-regulation seems to start already in the
reading process. It has also been shown that self-regulating processes (which
usually are considered as metacognitive processes) can operate at an unconscious
level (Fitzsimons & Bargh, 2004). Therefore, it could be of particular interest to
examine how variations of questions in problem texts can influence the compre-
hension and solution of a problem.

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The literature survey

First, the titles and abstracts from the 199 references about word problems are
analyzed, where the references are categorized with respect to type of research
(empirical or theoretical, and what is being studied/discussed). Thereafter, in the
second section, reading comprehension and problem solving will be discussed,
using results from relevant references (from both types of literature searches, see
above).

Word problems
Table 1 presents the number of some different types of research studies found
about word problems. To only study titles and abstracts does have its limitations,
and for some references it has also been difficult to decide exactly what type of
research is being discussed in the full article. Some duplicates do also exist in the
database, and it cannot be guaranteed that all have been found. The conclusion
from these remarks is to not to take the numbers too exactly, but to see the over-
all distribution. Also, and more importantly, the purpose of the different catego-
ries is to find relevant literature (the named categories) for the purpose of this
paper, and not to make a complete categorization and description of all refer-
ences.
Overall, not many studies exist that in a direct manner examines the relation
between reading and problem solving among the 199 references about word
problems. However, studies that vary the wording of a text and examine the ef-
fect on the solution or solution process can also be of interest in order to see how
the comprehension of the text is related to the solving.

Table 1. Hierarchy of categories of references among 199 articles about word prob-
lems, with the number of references in each category given. Named categories include
references that have been studied in more detail in section 4.2. All subcategories are
not necessarily disjoint.
Empirical studies 115
Variation of variables 75
Effect on performance (i.e., right or wrong solution) 52
Effect of text formulation [Category EPl] 19
Effect of reading ability [Category EP2] 4
Effect on the solving process 15
Effect of text formulation [Category ES] 4
Case (no structured variation of variables) 40
Discussions or theoretical studies 77
Types/properties of problems (including how solving can be affected) 12
[Category Dl]
Types of factors affecting solving problems [Category D2] 7

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Reading comprehension and problem solving

This discussion will focus on the results from different studies, where different
types of students and problems have been used, which of course can affect the
results in different ways. However, this discussion will settle with the conclusion
that there exist problems/students for which these types of results emerge, which
then will be interpreted from a reading comprehension perspective. Therefore, no
full meta-analysis of purposes, methods and results of studies will be performed.
Several studies show that the performance in solving problems can be negatively
affected by a higher complexity of the language used in the problem text (Cate-
gory EPI in table 1, e.g., Abedi & Lord, 2001) as well as by a relatively lower
reading ability among students (Category EP2, e.g., Jordan & Hanich, 2000).
Although these results can be seen as quite obvious, theoretically they can be
interpreted as showing the need for more general literacy skills also when read-
ing and solving problems in mathematics.
Both task context and situation context (Wedege, 1999) have been studied in
the analyzed references. For word problems, the task context has been varied in
different ways in empirical studies, for example, by trying to make the text more
personal or interesting for the reader (Bates & Wiest, 2004). These types of
studies focus on the effect the context may have on the performance among stu-
dents (Category EPl), and different types of effects have been found, but it is not
clear how these results should be interpreted. Does an increase in interest cause
an increase in the effort that the student puts into trying to solve the problem, or
does it activate more relevant prior knowledge that can be helpful when solving
the problem? These types of questions have not been answered in the reviewed
literature. Also, as the study by Renninger, Ewen and Lasher (2002) shows, there
are many different types of interests that come into play at the same time in a
rather complex way, such as interest for reading, for mathematics, and for the
context described in the problem text. More generally, these results seem to de-
pend on a rather complex, and seemingly not thoroughly investigated, interplay
between properties of the text, the reader, and the situation.
Several studies show that students often seem to ignore realistic considera-
tions when solving mathematical problems (e.g., Yoshida et aI., 1997). However,
other studies have altered the physical and social situation when solving a prob-
lem (i.e., the situation context), which resulted in more realistic answers among
the students (Roth, 1996; Wyndhamn & Siilj6, 1997). Thereby, how the student
experiences the situation will affect the problem-solving process, that is, the
comprehension of the situation is a relevant factor when solving (word) prob-
lems. Others (e.g., De Corte, Verschaffel, & De Win., 1985) describe a word
problem as a quite peculiar type of text that can include ambiguous statements,
which in the given situation need to be interpreted in a partiCUlar way (e.g., a
statement that a person has $5 could in general be interpreted as either that the

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person has exactly $5 or that the person has at least $5). Thus, one needs specific
types of prior knowledge about how statements in this situation should be inter-
preted, that is, one needs a type of content-specific literacy skill in this type of
situation. However, as a side effect, as these type of skills evolve they seem to
cause students to produce unrealistic answers in certain situations.
Another content-specific skill that seems to evolve among some students is
to focus on numbers and keywords in the problem text (Hegarty, Mayer, &
Monk, 1995). This surely seems to be a reading strategy specific to mathematics,
since Bilsky, Blachman, Chi, Mui and Winter (1986) show that students' reading
strategies can be influenced by making them read a text either as a mathematics
problem or as a telling of a story. When read as a problem, the text was read with
a focus on quantitative aspects and as a story it was read with a focus on more
qualitative and temporal aspects.
Studies that in a more direct manner examine both the mental representation
(often by letting students retell the text) and the solving of the problem consis-
tently show a strong connection between these two aspects (Category ES, e.g.,
Cummins, Kintsch, Reusser, & Weimer, 1988), that is, the students solve the
problem as they have understood it. Another possibility would be that one creates
an elaborate mental representation of the text but bases the solution on something
else (e.g., parts of the text itself and not the mental representation of the text).
More detailed ,studies of the relationship between the mental representation and
the solution show that better problem solvers mostly remember the semantic
structure of the text while worse problem solvers mostly remember details in the
text (Hegarty et al., 1995), and that the retelling of a problem text sometimes is
made in another order than what was presented in the given text, an order that
more closely resembles the calculation that is used when solving the problem
(Hershkovitz & Nesher, 2001). This last result appeared both when the retelling
was performed before the solving of the task (i.e., directly after reading the text)
and when it was performed after the problem had been solved. Thus, the solving
of the problem seems to have already begun in the reading process, a possibility
discussed earlier in this paper. The existence of a specific question in the text as
an important aspect was also discussed earlier. Therefore, in order to more
clearly see a possible more direct effect of the mathematical situation (and not
the existence of a question) it would be interesting to examine the mental repre-
sentation before a question is given. However, no such studies have been found
in this literature survey.

Conclusions
From the discussions in this paper it becomes evident that the relationship be-
tween reading comprehension and problem solving is complex. First, the reading
process can affect the problem solving process, but can also act as an integral

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part of the solving process. However, not much research seems to have been
done involving the latter relationship. Second, the literature survey has given ex-
amples of how the problem-solving situation seems to affect the reading process.
However, not much research seems to have been done that directly focuses on
this relationship, but the results discussed in the literature survey seem to be able
to explain by assuming that the situation affects the reading process in certain _
ways, for example, that the reader uses specific strategies (or literacy skills) in
this type of situation.

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