In this study we investigated the effect of the request to reword the text of problematic word
problems on the occurrence of realistic answers. We proposed the activity of rewording four
word problems to fifth-grade pupils either working individually or in dyads. We found that for
one of the problems the rewording in dyads produced a strong increase in pupils' realistic
answers, for another one a small increase, and no increase at all for the other two. We also
analysed pupils' reworded texts in order to characterize the kind of information added. For all …