Design of Meta-Problem with Open Information Structure Approach

Abstract

We have designed a task to pose a word problem by selecting and combining adequate quantity propositions that are provided. The problem posing task requires learners to think about their problem-solving of the word problems. We, therefore, call the problem-posing task “meta-problem” for the original word problem. In the design of the problem-posing task, we modeled the word problem as a structure composed of several quantity propositions, and defined the task as a reconstruction of an adequate structure by combining several quantity propositions. We call the design method “open information structure approach”. This approach that we successfully applied to arithmetic word problems has potential as a general method to design meta-problems from an original problem and to realize automatic diagnosis and feedback to support the solving process of the meta-problem. The problem-posing task in the arithmetic word problem as an example of a design of meta-problem with open information structure approach is explained.