A bag of snack food has 4 vitamins and weighs 228 grams. How many grams of snack food are in 6 bags?
228/4 or 228/6. The student chooses to divide because there is a big number and a small number.
Students use superficial cues or irrelevant information to choose operations. (See encyclopedia entry Choosing Operations in Modeling) This problem can be used to investigate how students are choosing operations for word problems, how students conceive of operations, and student’s ability to connect operations to contextualized situations.