Abstract
The present study analysed experimental data from the MultiLila project (2016-2020) and aimed to determine the explanatory factors in the Mathematical Word Problem (MWP) performance of multilingual primary school children of very low socioeconomic status (SES) from Hyderabad, India. It also considered the impact of the presentation of essential information (verbal or visual) within the problem.
Subtraction and number recognition scores were the only statistically significant predictors of overall MWP performance, and children showed the strongest performance on problems with verbal presentation of information. Whilst children found the MWP task challenging, they performed well considering the complex demands of the task, and any poor performance was not found to be attributed to the children’s language proficiency or wider sociolinguistic factors. It is plausible that their performance was a result of minimal classroom exposure to this style of problem or sociocultural unfamiliarity with the scenarios presented in the problems.