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Do Students Who Know More Solve Problems More Successfully?

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Conference

2002 Annual Conference

Location

Montreal, Canada

Publication Date

June 16, 2002

Start Date

June 16, 2002

End Date

June 19, 2002

ISSN

2153-5965

Conference Session

Understanding Students: Cognition

Page Count

7

Page Numbers

7.439.1 - 7.439.7

DOI

10.18260/1-2--11201

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/11201

Download Count

338

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Paper Authors

author page

Cindy Finelli

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Abstract

In this paper, the relationship between a student’s knowledge base and his or her problem solving ability is studied. In particular, results from a new quiz approach in which the two characteristics are decoupled as much as possible are presented. The approach reformats the standard quiz to include two related parts; one which asks students to express the depths of their knowledge about a particular topic using words, and one which involves solving a short computational problem. The approach was studied across different universities, with different instructors, and in different electrical engineering courses, and the results indicate that a student’s knowledge base and his or her problem solving ability are correlated despite the different populations. Aside from the intuitively obvious relationship between these characteristics, this implies that students who limit their understanding to computational procedures tend to do more poorly than students who are able to extract other information from lectures and homework assignments. When such data is shown to students, instructors will have tools for coaching students on information extraction in the cognitive domain.

Finelli, C. (2002, June), Do Students Who Know More Solve Problems More Successfully? Paper presented at 2002 Annual Conference, Montreal, Canada. 10.18260/1-2--11201

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