AN ANALYSIS OF ARITHMETIC PROBLEM POSING BY MIDDLE SCHOOL STUDENTS

The mathematical problems generated by 509 middle school students, who were given a brief written ''story-problem'' description and asked to pose questions that could be answered using the information, were exa mined for solvability, linguistic and mathematical complexity, and rel ationships within the sets of posed problems. It was found that studen ts generated a large number of solvable mathematical problems, many of which were syntactically and semantically complex, and that nearly ha lf the students generated sets of related problems. Subjects also solv ed eight fairly complex problems, and the relationship between their p roblem-solving performance and their problem posing was examined to re veal that ''good'' problem solvers generated more mathematical problem s and more complex problems than ''poor'' problem solvers did. The mul tiple-step data analysis scheme developed and used herein should be us eful to teachers and other researchers interested in evaluating studen ts' posing of arithmetic story problems.