An Evaluation of Elementary Students’ Ability of Problem Solving in Information Processing

Abstract

This paper introduces a system that assesses how an elementary student acquires unfamiliar information to solve non-routine real life problems in the perspective of information processing. Students are required to understand the situations, select and apply the relevant information to solve the problems. All the problem solving procedures, including inquiry behaviors, are automatically recorded for off-line data analysis. By running an experiment with a total of 32 grade-5 students, our study evaluated their problem solving processes by analyzing the correlation between students’ performance and behavior data. The results reveal that students might have difficulty in applying the information to solve the problems correctly, and it suggests that integrating discrete information may be the biggest obstacle for the elementary students to solve the problems.