A Study Of The Capacity Of The Problem Solving For Grade Eight Students

An increasing number of internationally comparative assessments focus on an individual's ability to pose, formulate, solve and interpret problems using mathematics with a variety of situations and contexts, rather than the capacity to answer familiar textbook questions. The basic education curriculum reform which starts from the year of 2001 also makes the cultivation of the problem-solving skills as one part of the reform.This paper takes all the grade eight students in a junior school in Changchun, Jilin province as the object of the study. With the theory of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), I prepared an examination paper which includes both routine tasks and mathematical real-life problems in the area of algebra in order to test and analyze the skills that students acquire.The data of the test are analyzed by SPSS and the results show that, there are some difficulties for these students to solve problems with real situation. For example, it is difficult for them to abstract simple mathematical questions from the real-life problems, or they always neglect some important key words in the problems. In addition, the results also suggest that the study of other subjects, especially the study of Chinese is helpful for them to understand the meaning of the problems.