High School Students' Physics Representation Level And Problem-solving Strategies

Taking 60 seniors from a high school in Taizhou, Jiangyan as the subject, this project, with method of Cognitive test and the method of interviewing, discusses on how high school students with uneven academic ranks deal with the problem representation and choose their ways to figure it out when confronted with the ill-structured physics questions.Indications of the research are as follows:(1) When dealing with the well-structured questions,77.8% of the excellent students can reach the perfect presentation, while in contrast only 7.8% of the deprived students can do the same.(2)In face of ill-structured questions,70% of the excellent students can reach the perfect representation, similar to what it is in the case of well-structured ones. However, it leaves 4% of the deprived students only to succeed at the questions but 53% of them at the character-representation phase.(3)The outcomes of both excellent and deprived students tested appear to be much better in the case of well-structured questions.(4)Excellent students prefer the strategy of forward-reasoning, with which the questions can be solved without a hitch. In contrast, deprived students would rather use strategies of backward-reasoning or the mixed kind based on formula derivation when given the ill-structured questions.Here are the conclusions:(1)Discrepancy on the representation is remarkable when high school students with varied academic ranks deal with different-structured physics questions.(2)The structure of question can be a key factor to its representation. The differences are prominent when students deal with different-structured physics questions.(3)Academic performance interacts with the structure of the questions. The presentation of excellent students stays almost the same when they are dealing with different-structured questions, while the poor students cannot make it if the structure of the question gets complex.(4)Most excellent students choose the forward-reasoning strategy when they are dealing with the different-structured questions. Nevertheless, deprived students may turn to different methods based on backward-reasoning when the questions are ill-structured. Yet, whether this proves to be always true remains uncertain still.