Mentor: Sarah Watt, Ph.D.

There is a national crisis where student scores on state assessments are significantly declining. In 2019, less than half of eighth graders nationwide scored proficient on the tests (Barbieri et al., 2023). This leads to the point where effective strategies are crucial for teachers to use for students to understand foundational mathematical concepts, starting from elementary school. Using worked examples has been commonly used and shown positive outcomes. This leads to the research to be conducted to identify how worked and solved examples are affecting students in terms of assisting students to become increasingly proficient in math as a subject. Several studies have found that there are varying levels of evidence to support the effectiveness of this instructional tool known as example-based learning (Barbieri et al., 2023).
Conducted studies and research support the initiative for worked examples, saying that they’re more effective than students completing problem-solving practice questions alone. Using worked examples after knowledge acquisition is the most beneficial time in the students' learning process for implementation (Barbieri et al., 2023). This reinforces students’ newly found schemas instead of only solving practice problems that may not help to improve student understanding in the early stages. Studies have also shown that students with low prior knowledge are the student demographic to improve the most from correctly solved word problems (Barbieri et al., 2023).

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