Impact of prompts on students’ mathematical problem posing

This study used three pairs of problem-posing tasks to examine the impact of different prompts on students’ problem posing. Two kinds of prompts were involved. The first asked students to pose 2–3 different mathematical problems without specifying other requirements for the problems, whereas the second kind of prompt did specify additional requirements. A total of 2124 students’ responses were analyzed to examine the impact of the prompts along multiple dimensions. In response to problem-posing prompts with more specific requirements, students tended to engage in more in-depth mathematical thinking and posed much more linguistically and semantically complex problems with more relationships or steps required to solve them. The findings from this study not only contribute to our understanding of problem-posing processes but also have direct implications for teaching mathematics through problem posing.