Many people find that solving story problems is challenging. A key source of the difficulty is symbolizing problem situations. In two experiments, we tested whether diagrams promoted successful symbolization of two-operator story problems, and we tested whether diagrams that depicted the integration of operations were more beneficial than diagrams that depicted the two operations separately. Findings in the two experiments were similar but not identical. Overall, participants were more likely to generate conceptually correct equations—though not always in integrated form—in the presence of diagrams, and this pattern was driven by the beneficial effects of diagrams for participants with lower visuospatial abilities. Further, participants with more negative attitudes towards mathematics were more likely to generate integrated equations with diagrams that depicted the integration of operations. Thus, the effects of diagrams varied across subgroups of participants.

中文翻译：

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符号化代数故事问题：图表有用吗？

许多人发现解决故事问题具有挑战性。困难的一个主要来源是象征问题的情况。在两个实验中，我们测试了图表是否促进了两个操作员故事问题的成功符号化，我们测试了描述操作集成的图是否比分别描述两个操作的图更有益。两个实验的结果相似但不完全相同。总体而言，参与者更有可能在有图表的情况下生成概念上正确的方程——尽管并不总是以整合的形式——这种模式是由图表对视觉空间能力较低的参与者的有益影响所驱动的。更远，对数学持消极态度的参与者更有可能生成带有描述运算整合的图表的整合方程。因此，图表的效果在参与者的子组中有所不同。