Do students attend to and profit from representational illustrations of non-standard mathematical word problems?

Verschaffel et al. (1994) presented upper primary school children word problems that were problematic from a realistic modelling point of view (so-called P-items). They found that pupils in general did not use their everyday knowledge when confronted with such P-items, and thus solved them unrealistically. In this paper we report two related studies that investigated whether and how illustrations that represent the problematic situation described in a P-item help higher education students to imagine the problem situation and thereby solve the problem more realistically. We found that participants barely look at these representational illustrations and when they do look, there is no effect of the illustrations on the realistic nature of their solutions.