Solving arithmetic word problems has been a challenge for primary students due to difficulties in understanding the problem structure and relating the quantities in the problem to each other. This paper reports on an action research study to enhance students' subtraction word problem-solving skills. The authors observed that their students had…

Elementary school students struggle in interpreting the equal sign as a symbol denoting equivalence. Although many have advocated using a pan-balance scale to help students develop this understanding, less is known about what features associated with this model support learning. To attempt to control and examine these features, the investigators…