Solving story-based arithmetic problems: achievement of children with hearing impairment and their interpretation of meaning.

This article considers how a sample of Norwegian school children, ages 6 through 10 with hearing impairment, master three different types of elementary arithmetic problems presented in a nonreading format. The article outlines the effect of task-specific factors on the level of difficulty, as well as the children's understanding of problem structures. The results showed that semantic structure of the problems affected the level of difficulty. The problems were not solved significantly better by students from grade 4 than students from grade 1. Qualitative analyses revealed that the children interpreted the meaning of the imposed problems in three different ways: (1) as numbers and procedures, (2) as take-away situations, and (3) as part-part-whole relations.