Technical Problem Solving among 10-Year-Old Students as Related to Science Achievement, Out-of-School Experience, Domain-Specific Control Beliefs, and Attribution Patterns.

This article investigates the relationships among the structure of everyday experience, domain-specific control beliefs, acquisition of science knowledge, and solving of everyday technical problems, in a sample of 531 10-year-olds from Germany and the United States. The theoretical starting point for this study was the assumption that children acquire operative schemata and mental models through daily experiences with technical equipment and toys. The authors assume that these not only transfer to solving technical everyday problems, but also have a positive influence on science learning in elementary schools whenever there is a sufficient overlap between the science curriculum and everyday experiences. Such a positive influence would encourage parents to selectively provide such experiences for their children. In the study, the authors integrated research on information processing and problem solving with motivation theory. The exploratory path model the authors started from is based on an understanding of problem solving as a dynamic interactive process of skill and will. Whether the theoretical assumptions were valid within and across countries was tested by means of structural equation modeling.