| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 教育研究所 === 104 === Cultivate problem-solving ability is an important goal in science education. Previous studies indicated effects of task difficulty, learners’ metacognitive behaviors, and working memory span on problem-solving performance (Veenman, Prins, & Elshout, 2002; Shin, Jonassen, & McGee, 2003; Cho, & Cannon, 2007). Whetehr learenrs’ metacognitive behaviors are affected by their working memory span and the task difficulty remains unexplored. To address this gap, the present study has two aims, to understand whether students with different working memory span have different problem-solving performance and metacognitive behaviors, and how problem-solving performance and metacognitive behaviors vary accprding to task difficulty. This study also explore the role of metacognitive ability in problem- solving .
The study took a mixed-method approach. Problems with low, medium and high levels of difficulties were designed on the topic of friction. Participants were eighth-graders who have received related instructions. A test friction was implemented to select, 37 students who have similar base of prior knowledge on Friction. These students were interviewed while completing the problemsolving tasks. Their task performances were scored and the interviews were coded for cognitive and metacognitive habavoirs. Relationships between learners’ working memory span, metacognitive behaviors, and problems-solving performance in different levels of difficulties were then analyzed. Cases were also used , to understand learners’ metacognitive behaviors and problem-solving processs in different task difficulties.
The results show that learner's’ problem-solving performance varied depended on task difficulty. Performance on “analysis of task conditions”and “chart decomposion”did not vary across task diffulcities; however, learners exhibited optimal performance at the medium
difficult level for performance on “reasoning causal relations”and “integrating and inferring”. tudents with large working memory span outperform their counter cohors on all diffiultiy levels. Qualitative findings also showed that learners with higher working memory span were abled to monitor problem-solving process to reduce reasoning flaws and/or made corrections with errors occurred, which in turn, yielded better performances. Learenrs with lower working memory span demonstrated the aforementioned behavioral pattern only on the task with midiun level of difficulty.problem-solving perofmrance was droped at the high difficulty level due to cognitive overload. In that situation, learenrs no longer monitored their reasoning process and were not aware of realsoing flaws. This study shows that task difficulty and emtacognitive behaviors have great influence on problem- solving process and performance.
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