Comparing the frequency and variation of additive word problems in United States first-grade textbooks in the 1980s and the Common Core era

Abstract

Decades of research conducted worldwide has resulted in a taxonomy for word problems involving additive situations. Research published in the 1980s found that U.S. curricula only exposed first-grade students to a small subset of the easiest types of word problems. Widely adopted curriculum standards in the United States call for first-grade students to be exposed to the full set of 11 types of problems in the taxonomy, but research shows that substantive changes to the content of instructional materials can be elusive. We asked whether the U.S. curricula continue to expose students to the same small subset of problems. We coded four widely used first-grade textbooks from the Common Core era. Comparing our findings with those from the 1980s, we found many more word problems, a wider variety of word problems, and a consistent pattern in relative emphasis of various problems in the current textbooks. These results clearly show that U.S. students’ exposure to word problems through curriculum materials has changed. This finding lays the groundwork for further research to determine whether such changes in exposure to different types of word problems have resulted in changes to relative problem difficulty.