Non-routine text exercises in early-school mathematics education

Abstract

The aim of this article is to draw the teacher’s attention to the importance of the text-based, non-routine problem-solving tasks presented in some early-school mathematics textbooks. Non-routine math text exercises are deliberately of the wrong-wording and misleading-task type. The purpose of this is to engage and develop the student’s logical thinking and also problem solving skills, as they will have to analyze every aspect of its structure and apply the right correction in order to solve it. Unfortunately, today not every textbook offers an insight into or examples of non-routine tasks. Sadly, in some textbooks series these non-routine math text exercises are completely absent, meaning that very often only a limited number of students will ever come across them during their education years.