The Difference Of Senior School Students' Representation And Strategies In Well-structured And Ill-structured Physical Problem-solving

Problem-solving is a basic way in which human beings communicate with the environment. People acquire knowledge and develop intelligence mainly through information communicate and problem-solving in their daily lives and learning. The student's learning is also a kind of process of problem-solving. In the context of the course reform of foundational education, it has been a general consensus that problem-solving play an important role in teaching and learning. Teachers should understand students how to obtain and apply the knowledge in the process of problem-solving, and thus improve the pertinence and effectiveness of teaching.Cognitive psychology had achieved many results in many aspects of problem-solving, such as mental mechanism, problem representations, strategy obtaining, metacognitive etc. However, many researches concentrated on well-structured problem but there are rarely researches on ill-structured problem. Ill-structured physical problem are prevalent in daily life, the study of ill-structured physical problem-solving has certain theoretical and practical significance.On the basis of previous studies and the direction of information-processing theory of the cognitive science, we studied the core aspect of problem-solving of senior school students. Namely, this study researched senior school students' difference of representation and strategies in well-structured and ill-structured physical problem-solving by employing cognitive production analysis and protocol analysis method. The study obtains following results:1. The difference is significant in problem representation between the grade 1 senior students in well-structured and ill-structured physical problem-solving; The number of representation entirely students are significant more in well-structured physical problem-solving than in ill-structured. The problem representation was more fully and entirely in well-structured than in ill-structured physical problem-solving. 2. The poor students probably mainly use the conversing reasoning strategies or tentative reasoning strategies. While excellent students probably mainly use the concept or schema driven positive reasoning strategies or the scene construction strategies.3. By qualitative and quantitative analysis of the mistakes of cognitive production, the conclusion is drawn as that the mistakes mainly concentrate on scientific representation and mathematic representation stages in well-structured physical problem-solving and the naive representation in ill-structured physical problem-solving.