Investigating the effectiveness of illustration representation-based Instruction on word problem-solving ability in mathematics

The aim of the present study is to investigating the effectivenessof illustration representation-based Instruction on 6th grade students' word problem-solving ability in mathematics. This research is based content analysis and semi-experimental design of the pretest-post test type, follow up with the control group. After studying and designing 40 male student of the sixth grade elementary a school in the academic year of 1396-97 in yasouj participated in this study as volunteers. They were randomly assigned to experimental and control group and the experimental group were educated for 9 sessions (one session per week) using representation-based Instruction method. Shannon entropy technique was adopted in order to analyze data in content analysis, and variance analysis test with repeated measures was used for the semi-experimental part. The results of the content analysis show that the greatest attention for the distribution and the presence of word problems is respectively directed to bare representation, essential representation, helpful representation, and finally to useless representation respectively. In addition, the results of the variance analysis with repeated measures reveals that there is a significant difference between the averages of all the components of word problem-solving ability of control group and experimental group (p<0.05). Therefore, it can be concluded that illustration representation Instruction increases students' word problem-solving ability in mathematics. Besides, the results indicate that the effect of using illustration representation will be consistent over time. The results of pairwise comparisons of different representations also show that the effects of different representations are not the same.