The Difference On Ill-structured Problem-solving Skills About Geography In High School Students

As a basic skill in the 21 st century,problem-solving skills are considered a central goal of education in almost all countries.In China's high school geography teaching,the experts have also clearly pointed out that it is one of the goals of high school geography curriculum to cultivate students' ability to explore and try to solve practical geography problems.Since most of the problems people encounter in their daily life are ill-structured,the key to enhance students' ability to solve practical geography problems is to develop their ability to solve ill-structured geography problems.Therefore,in order to understand the difference on ill-structured problem-solving skills about geography in high school students,and to help the front-line geography educators to improve the ability of high school students to solve practical geographical problems.Based on relevant theories of cognitive psychology,this study takes the existing ill-structured problem-solving process model as the theoretical framework,and designs the evaluation tool which is based on the selecting new water recourse in Shanghai.Using this tool,this study evaluated the ill-structured problem-solving skills about geography of 119 high school students who come from two schools in X city of Zhejiang province,including the skills of representing the problem,developing solutions,executing solutions or making justifications for solutions,and monitoring and evaluating solutions.The results showed that:(1)The high school students' ill-structured problemsolving skills about geography is not good,and need to be improved;(2)The high school students with different self-expectations for educational level,geography grades and situated Learning participation have significant differences in the overall level of the ill-structured problem-solving skills about geography;(3)The high school students in different living areas have significant differences in the partial level of the illstructured problem-solving skills about geography;(4)The high school students with different genders and interests in geography have no significant difference in the illstructured problem-solving skills about geography.For the poor performance of high school students' ill-structured problem-solving skills about geography,the teachers can use this as a reference to make up for the shortcomings of students to promote the development of students' related skills.For the difference of ill-structured problem-solving skills about geography between different groups of high school students,the teachers can make up for the shortcomings of poor students by changing teaching methods and means,so as to help them catch up.At the same time,the educators and researchers can also refer to the assessment method of high school students' ill-structured problem-solving skills about geography in this study,so as to evaluate students' ill-structured problem-solving skills.