Middle-School Students’ Behavior Pattern and Strategy Selection in Problem Solving: A Study Based on Data from PISA 2012

Abstract

Vary-one-thing-at-a-time (VOTAT) strategy is regarded as the optimal strategy in the knowledge acquisition stage of complex problem solving (CPS) in many studies. Based on the log-file data of the Climate Control task of computer-based assessment of the CPS in the 2012 cycle of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), 388,931 pieces of records from 20,597 students who used VOTAT were collected for an in-depth analysis. The result of the latent class analysis identified three kinds of strategies, the depth-first strategy, breadth-first strategy and mixed-strategy. The Pearson’s chi-squared Test and Welch variance analysis showed that the task performance of the students in the three groups varied. These results suggest that VOTAT strategy could be distinguished in a more elaborated way, which would contribute to portray the CPS process in detail, and so it is proved to play a key role in the CPS performance again.