The Effect Of Knowledge Structure On The Problem-solving

The problem-solving is always the research focus in the Educational Psychology, so there have been lots of research materials, which demonstrate the fundamental role of conceptual understanding in the problem-solving. And the knowledge of expert exists as the system structure. But the researches about the physics circuit in the senior high school are still insufficient. So the present research takes the physics circuit as the example, try to explore the influence of system structure on the problem-solving.The system structure is the idea about the integrated system of knowledge, only when the structured knowledge combined with the procedure knowledge, the process of problem-solving will be successful. In this study, the researcher want to explore how the different levels of knowledge structure impact on the strategies used in the problem solving. We selected the students from shanghai GuCun high school as the subjects, then divided the students into two groups, compared the differences between the two groups.The experiment included two parts. The first part also can be divided into two phase:the materials for the first phase are four physics circuit exercises, when the subjects complete these tasks, according to their performance, the researches classified the students into two groups which have the high level of knowledge structure and low level of knowledge structure. The second phase is the thinking aloud report about four fault diagnosis, the researches analyze the difference from the errors and steps in the problem-solving process. The second part is the semi-structured interview and retrospective debriefings. We study the knowledge nature from the classification and the production systems.The results indicate that different students have different level of knowledge structure, and the low level will lead to the errors when the students need to do systematical analysis. The students who have the high level of knowledge structure can have right and effective strategies with the comprehensive analysis. When we make further exploration, we found that although the all the students have the related knowledge, the good students have greater awareness of classification and more exquisite production system, have more systematical cognition of circuit.The indication for the real instruction is the importance of knowledge structure. The teachers should have the effective instructing form such as demonstration and simulation to help the students develop the high level of structured knowledge.