Secondary Students' Maths Open Problem-solving Strategies

Open-ended problem solving has great effect on developing the creative consciousness and thinking of students. Therefore a mathematics open-ended problem has been thought highly of in mathematics teaching and curriculum. However, the open-ended problem solving performance of junior students is not favorable. Therefore, it is of great importance to study strategies for scaffolding students' open-ended problem solving process.Both the question prompts strategy and the cooperative learning strategy is found to be effective in scaffolding students' problem-solving. However, previous research has seldom investigated the effectiveness of those strategies in scaffolding junior students' open-ended problem solving. Especially, there is no such experimental study in Chinese educational research.An experimental study was conducted to examining the effects of question prompts and cooperative learning in scaffolding junior students' problem-solving process in open-ended problem solving. First, in view of junior students' thinking of way, according to the characteristics of mathematics open-ended problem solving, we designed a series of question prompts. Secondly, we conducted an experimental study to examine the effects of question prompts and cooperative learning in scaffolding middle school students' problem-solving process in an open-ended problem. Then, we used both quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze the data and reached conclusions. Finally, we put forward some proposals for junior maths teachers' .teaching of open-ended problem solving.The outcomes revealed that both question prompts and cooperative learning had significant positive effects on students' performance. When the two strategies were used together, their effects could be promoted by each other.