물리 문제 해결 과정에서의 학생들의 사고 과정에 관한 연구

A Study on Students' Thinking Processes in Solving Physics Problems

The purpose of this study was to analyze students' physics problem solving processes and to find the patterns of their problem spaces when high school and university students solved the physics problems. A total of 51 students in a high school and in two universities participated in this study. Their thinking processes in solving 5 physics problems on electric circuit were recorded by using 'thinking aloud' method and were transferal into protocols. 'The protocols were analyzed by the coding system of problem solving process. One of the major theoretical contributions of the computer simulation approach to problem solving is the idea of problem space. Such a concept of problem space was applied to physics problems on electric circuit in this study, and students' protocols were analyzed by the basic problem spaces which were made up from the item analysis by the researcher. The results are as follows: 1) On the average 4.0 test items among 5 ones were solved successfully by all subjects, and all of the items were solved correctly by only 19 persons among all of them. 2) In regard to the general steps of problem solving process, there was little difference for each item between the good solvers and the poor ones. But according to the degree of difficulty of task there was a good deal of difference. For a complex problem all of 4 steps were used by most of students, but for a simple one only 3 steps except evaluating step were used by most of them. 3) It was found in this study that most of students used mainly the microscopic approach, that is, a method of applying Ohm's law on electric circuit simply and immediately, not using the properties of electric circuits. And also it was observed that most of students used the soloing tom below, that is, a solving path in which they were the first to calculate physical Quantities of circuit elements, before they caught hold of the meaning of the given problem regardless of the degree of difficulty.