High School Students' Mathematical Modeling Problem Solving Cognitive Mechanism Research

Since 2003 the Ministry of Education promulgated the "ordinary high school curriculum standards(experimental)," Mathematical modeling as part of the school curriculum has gone through more than a decade. Due to a variety of reasons, mathematical modeling of high school curricula is carried out slowly.Students’ ability of mathematical modeling has not been improved. With the deepening of curriculum reform, and the revising curriculum standard, mathematical modeling is considered as one of the high school curriculum standards advocated by the "core mathematical literacy". Its status will be further strengthened and the teaching of mathematical modeling and the assessment will surely be paid mere attention.Heyuan city is located in remote mountainous areas of northern Guangdong province, where the level of education ranks last in the whole province. Mathematical modeling is relatively in backward situation. Based on mathematical modeling Education Survey, mathematical modeling of high school students in Heyuan was thoroughly tested. Surprisingly, I found the levels of local students were extremely low(the overall level of 2.96). The fundamental factor which determines students’ mathematical modeling capabilities is that their level of knowledge of experience.This paper is mainly to study high school students’ cognitive mechanisms of solving mathematical modeling problem. On the one hand, from a cognitive perspective, students get a better understanding of mathematical modeling. On the other hand, from teaching and learning perspective, some suggestions were given on mathematical modeling. Among the survey of 1652 high school students, 30 of the subjects were finally selected by using oral report analysis, general cognitive processes of mathematical modeling.As a result, a general process of mathematical modeling and cognitive processes was obtained. Through interviews with some teachers and students, we discussed the main factors, which affect the ability of mathematical modeling. According to this, I made a number of suggestions on mathematical modeling of teaching and learning in high school.