Screening the Personal Need for the Structure and solving word problems with fractions

This paper presents the results of a pilot study of the impact of Personal Need for Structure of the selected mathematical competence. We were interested whether there is a relationship between cognitive-personal variable (Personal Need for Structure) and the mathematical knowledge about fractions of freshmen. We realized the experiment with 113 students of the Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, Slovakia. We examined statistically significant dependencies between the cognitive-personality variable of the Personal Need for Structure and its subfactors F1 (the wish of the structure) and F2 (the reaction to the lack of the structure) and the success rate of solving tasks and word problems with fractions. We used statistical Cochrane Q test to detect dependencies between factors of the Personal Need for Structure scale and the Mathematical knowledge. We proved that the success rate of solving word problems with fractions is inversely proportional to the need for the structure. This means that the higher the overall score on the Personal Need for Structure scale and its subfactors is, the lower is the success rate of solving the word problems.