The effect of rewording and dyadic interaction on realistic reasoning in solving word problems

In this study we investigated the effect of the request to reword the text of problematic wordproblems on the occurrence of realistic answers. We proposed the activity of rewordingfour word problems to fifth-grade pupils either working individually or in dyads. We foundthat for one of the problems the rewording in dyads produced a strong increase in pupils'realistic answers, for another one a small increase, and no increase at all for the other two.We also analysed pupils' reworded texts in order to characterize the kind of informationadded. For all four problems the rewording in dyads produced richer texts in comparisonto the individual rewording. Moreover, for the problems where an increase in realisticanswers was observed, two particular kinds of information, named descriptive and actioninformation, were added by dyads who answered realistically.