An Empirical Study On Problem-Solving Ability Development Of High School Students

While reviewing the relevant studies of the fundamental education, it is found that the whole society and the educational field in western world have attached great importance to the cultivating students’ problem-solving ability. In many countries, this has been considered as the main issue in educational reform when governments formulate the new plan for the economic and social development or set goals for talent training. However, in China, the development of students’ problem-solving ability fails to get appropriate attention from the society, the family and the educational field. The educational reform proposals released recently indicate that the development of students’ problem-solving ability is just a problem that might be studied in academic research or in national macro-policies, and there is a long way to go before being actually put into practice in schools. Hence, it is of great significance to do the empirical investigation towards the status quo of high school students’ problem-solving ability, and to carry out the research from the perspective of educational practice, which is exactly the focus of this study.This research carries out an empirical investigation about the status quo of high school students’ problem-solving ability In S city, and it mainly focuses on the four following aspects: firstly, the main problems that the students encounter in daily life; secondly, the status quo of students’ problem-solving ability; thirdly, the factors influencing the development of that ability; fourthly, the suggestion for the cultivation and improvement.This research adopted a mixed approach—combing quantitative and the qualitative research methods by sorting out related literature, face-to-face interview, and questionnaire survey and data analysis, to explore high school students’ problem-solving ability in S city. After a broad range of literature review, and the field study, the researcher sort out the transcript of over 50,000 words of the interview, collected 2841 valid questionnaires and analyzed 155 statistical charts.According to the results of the empirical research, the researcher came to the conclusions as follow:firstly, the four main problems for the high school students are respectively the in-class study, the self-management, the interpersonal communication and the hands-on practice, in which the "in-class study" is the most widespread problems. Secondly, as to the status quo of the high school students’ problem-solving ability, through the interview, the research found that most of the teachers are not satisfied with students’ ability to deal with difficulties; besides, the questionnaire also indicates that over 59.4% of the students are not very content with their problem-solving ability neither, and there is only 13.5% of them shows great satisfaction towards the current situation. In general, the research findings demonstrate that the high school students today have poor problem-solving ability. Thirdly, the four main factors influencing students’ ability to address the problems are respectively the level of knowledge, the practical experience, the school education and the individual characteristics, among which the practical experience is regarded as the most significant one. Fourthly, the three standards for the evaluation of students’ problem-solving ability are:attitude, solution, strategy and quality. The results of the questionnaire survey further verified the reliability and validity of these three standards. Fifthly, according to the findings mentioned above, this research also provided some suggestion for the improvement of students’ problem-solving ability in terms of the government’s policy-making, the school education, the students themselves as well as the family and the society.This dissertation is mainly composed of seven chapters:the chapter 1 introduces the research background, the research status, the issues addressed and the methods adopted. The chapter 2 analyzes the theoretical foundation and proposes the research hypothesis. And in order to conduct the empirical investigation, the chapter 3 presents the process of the questionnaire design, the interview arrangement, the variables design, the analytical method comparison and the verification of the questionnaire’s reliability and validity. Besides, the chapter 4 shows the statistical analysis of the results of the questionnaire survey. The chapter 5 discusses the status quo of the high school students’ problem-solving ability and the factors involved. Moreover, the chapter 6 provides the concrete suggestion for improvement, and the chapter 7 mainly analyzes the basic conclusions, the limitations and the prospect of this research.