Creation and Elaboration of Problem Space Depending on Students' Attitudes toward the Task and Thinking Skills

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Inquiry has been emphasized in science classrooms, but the problems shown in the inquiry are somewhat different with ones that students usually meet and experience in everyday life. The purpose of this study is to investigate how attitudes toward the task and thinking skills affect students' problem solving process, especially, the way of creating a problem space and elaborating problem solving strategies when they have little schema. The difference in students' problem solving strategies of Lego Robotics class, one of the summer programs for 4th-6th grade gifted students, which is new to them, was investigated.
The results are as follows: (1) The difference in attitudes toward the task, or selection and identification of the missions, and the perception of operators, affected creating a different problem space. (2) Different level of thinking skills, or analytical and flexible thinking, efficient elaborative skill, and application of schema affected a different level of elaboration of the problem space and resulted in asuccess rate of problem solving. (3) Different initial problem space resulted in different problem solving strategies. But without thinking skills, students could not elaborate problem solving strategies efficiently.
Several instructional recommendations to promote scientific inquiry were suggested based on the results.

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