Part of the problem with this question is that many students today don't know what a "shepherd" is. Perhaps this is also a failure of education, but it isn't a failure of math education. It would be better to say a "farmer" owns these animals, since most children would have heard the word "farmer" at some point in their lives. Or maybe it would be better to say "your neighbor" has so many cats and so many dogs but then the kids would probably just guess some advanced age because crazy cat ladies.
> Part of the problem with this question is that many students today don't know what a "shepherd" is.
What a shepherd is is completely irrelevant [1] to the problem.
> Perhaps this is also a failure of education, but it isn't a failure of math education.
The inability to identify which things in a word problem are relevant to the question being asked is clearly a failure in education in the area of logic and reasoning, if not specifically in "math" per se.
[1] Well, unless "shepherd" is some thing that has ownership of a number of dogs and/or sheep that has a fixed mathematical relationship to its age, but I doubt any child's lack of experience with the term would leave them with a prior expectation that that was the case.
What a shepherd is is completely irrelevant to the problem.
...says the person privileged to know what a shepherd is. I agree that math education could be improved, but this study may not be the best basis for that improvement.
Really? I don't see that as being part of the problem. I have no idea whether it's true or not, but suspect it depends largely on socioeconomic status and geography.
Even if the children aren't familiar with the term "shepherd", it still comes down to the fact that they do not have enough information to answer the question and still attempt to perform some sort of calculation with no reasoning of why they are doing it.
