Investigation Of High School Students’ Abilities In Physics Problem Solving

The important role of problem solving in teaching and learning caused national attention. United States, Singapore, the United Kingdom and other countries put forward to develop students’ problem solving skills in the curriculum standards, preparation of teaching materials in some countries are also based on problem-solving. In the new curriculum reform in our country is also proposed to pay attention to the cultivation of students’ problem-solving abilities. So how the students’ problem-solving ability is, in what kind of level, society, schools and teachers should strive to change from which aspects to cultivate and improve students problem solving ability. Therefore, the evaluation of problem-solving ability reveals its effect, it is naturally got attention, one of the famous international comparative study, The Programme For International Student Assessment, which is concerned with the evaluation of whether students have the knowledge and skills to deal with real-life problems in the future, whether they can use the knowledge and skills to solve real-world problems, PISA2003 adds the evaluation item of problem-solving, to assess the level of the students solving real-life problems. In this research, the assessment to ability in physics problem solving was using PISA2003 evaluation framework for problem solving and problem solving in McREL for reference.This study focused on the status quo for the high school physics problem-solving ability, which involved a high school sophomore year to four classes of students in Henan province, with the knowledge topic of high school physics force and motion vectors, to evaluate students’ abilities in physics problem solving. First, the researchers combined with high school physics curriculum standards requirements of the force and motion in compulsory 1 module, selected and adapted original physical problems to form a test paper, under the guidance of problem-solving process, established the appropriate specific evaluation criteria. Then collected data by using test method, and then processed and analyzed the data, and the conclusions of the research are as follows:First, overall, the physics problem-solving ability of high school students was in low level, and the score line almost accorded with a normal distribution. In terms of the dimensions of the physics problem-solving ability, understanding the problem was stronger, characterizing the problem followed by, while the ability to represent the problem and the ability to use the laws of physics to solve the problem were both weak.Second, the each dimension of the problem solving skills were significantly related to the physics problem solving, the degree of any dimension among which would significantly affect the students’ abilities in physics problem solving. The correlation coefficient to characterize the problem and the ability in physics problem solving was 0.918, indicating that the impact of the ability to characterize the problem were better than the other sub-dimensions.Third, sophomore students’ abilities in physics problem solving were not significantly different in gender; while sophomore students’ abilities in physics problem solving were significantly associated with the students’ academic performance.