Complex Mathematical Problem Solving by Individuals and Dyads

Complex mathematical problem solving was examined in 2 studies using an episode from The Adventures of Jasper Woodbury. Each episode in the Jasper series consists of anarrative story that ends with a complex challenge that students are to solve. Solving the challenge involves formulating subproblems, organizing these subproblems into solution plans, differentiating solution-relevant from solution-irrelevant data, coordinating relevant data with appropriate sub-problems, executing computations, and deciding among alternative solutions. The episode examined in these studies was The Big Splash. The challenge is to construct a business plan for a booth at a school fun-fair fund-raiser. This article reports the results of using a technique that we developed for analyzing complex problem solving: solution-space analysis. In Experiment 1, the performances of 6th-grade and college students solving the problem under think-aloud instructions are compared. Relative to 6th-grade students, college students were more l...

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