Tekstbegrip Van Wiskundetaken: Een Moeilijke Opgave?

In secondary education, mathematics education has been highly influenced by Realistic Mathematics, which means that mathematical problems are presented in rich linguistic contexts. In order to solve the mathematical problem, students have to make a correct representation of the problem, and this puts a great demand on a students' text comprehension abilities. Especially for those with low language abilities, this may cause problems.In this research, we want to explore the relationship between students' general academic text comprehension abilities and their ability to understand mathematical texts. The role of the different aspects of text comprehension in processing the text of mathematical problems will also be looked at. On the basis of previous research, we expect a great influence of academic text comprehension on the text comprehension of mathematical texts. We think that especially text comprehension abilities at the meso-level will be important in comprehending mathematics.We used five tests to determine the students' text comprehension abilities. We can conclude from our analyses that there is a significant relation between general academic text comprehension and text comprehension of mathematical texts. In addition, there is a significant relation between general academic text comprehension at the meso-level and text comprehension of mathematical texts. This finding matches our expectation that especially abilities at the meso-level of text comprehension play a role in text comprehension of mathematical texts.