The Ability of Third, Fifth, and Seventh Graders to Understand and Apply a General Problem-Solving Heuristic Scheme.

This study assessed the ability of third, fifth, and seventh graders to learn a problem-solving heuristic scheme and apply it to grade-appropriate tasks. A framework was utilized that focused on metacognitive aspects of task performance such as planfulness, strategy selection, monitoring, and evaluation. It was expected that use of the scheme would require a degree of reflection about one's own thought processes that might be unavailable to younger students. A football analogy was developed to represent five steps in the problem-solving scheme, with each step associated with an appropriate question. A total of 10 students in each grade were taught the steps and shown how to apply them in everyday situations, concrete puzzles, and reading tasks. They were scored on their ability to remember the steps and use them with other reading passages, both immediately and at a follow-up session two weeks later. It was found that seventh graders could remember the problem-solving steps at follow-up better than the younger students could and were better able to use the scheme in the independent reading tasks. It was concluded that seventh graders, at least, could learn to apply such a scheme to a variety of academic tasks. (Author/RH)