two hundred pupils from secondary 1 to secondary 4 of two secondary schools in Bandar Seri Begawan were each given a set of ten word problems to solve.
These problems did not involve knowledge any of mathematical concepts or techniques beyond the scondary 1 level.
The pupils were instructed to read each problem carefully and then to draw a diagram that they felt would help them solve the problem.
Despite the instruction which was verbally emphasised when conducting the test, to draw diagrams for each problem, the distribution of cases for which there was no diagram varied from 5% to 64.5%.
The number of children who actually drew diagrams against those who did not for each question is given in Table 2 below.