CHILDREN'S KNOWLEDGE OF EFFECTIVE STRATEGIES IN THE SOLUTION OF EVERYDAY PROBLEMS

Recent contextual models of intellectual development have brought attention in the field of intelligence to the importance of the intellectual skills that individuals exhibit in their everyday lives and the strategies that individuals use to solve everyday sorts of problems. The purpose of the present study was to examine the knowledge that children have of the effectiveness of certain strategies in solving everyday problems and how children use this knowledge when aspects of everyday problems are changed.; Two-hundred and seventeen children from the 5th, 8th, and 11th grades were presented with 20 everyday situations that they might experience in the school setting or outside of the school setting. Children rated the effectiveness of six problem-solving strategies that were presented as solutions to the problems, both before and after information was added to the problem that either presented an additional obstacle that the students had to deal with or removed from the problem an obstacle that previously existed in the problem. Students' use of their strategy knowledge was appraised by comparing a child's profile of ratings to a profile of ratings derived from a set of teachers' responses to these problems.; The results demonstrated clear preferences for some problem-solving strategies over others, with these preferences being consistent for the school and nonschool problems and for all grade levels and genders. Age-related differences, however, were found when students were asked to use this strategy knowledge as elements of the everyday situations were changed. Older students and female students werer found to produce ratings that were more in line with the profile of ratings the teachers produced than were younger students or male students. The effects of grade level and gender were not attributable to a reluctance on the part of younger children or males to change their effectiveness ratings in response to the changing elements of the problem. Nor were these effects solely due to the differential familiarity or experience that students had with the problems.; Children's ability to use their strategy knowledge was related to self, teacher and parent assessments of the students' practical intellectual skills. The ability to use strategy knowledge was related to measures of academic achievement only for the 5th grade students.