Abstract
The purpose of this study is to examine the development of children's problem-solving skills. There is a hypothesis that experience in a natural setting will help develop these skills. To test this hypothesis a questionnaire was used which was created with 3steps consisting of 60 questions dealing with problem-solving skills. 1944 elementary-school students (second, fourth and sixth-grade students) filled out questionnaires. Of these, 1630 of the returned questionnaires were usable. A computer was used to correlate and perform a factor analysis on these 1630 completed questionnaires.
The results showed that there were ten factors which influenced a student's problem-solving skills: (1) desire to improve (2) having friends (3) insight and intelligence (4) consideration (5) power to act (6) maturity (7) imagination (8) trust and responsibility (9) experience (10) physical strength. Of the 60 questions of the questionnaire, a computer analysis selected these ten factors as being the most reliably correlated with 40. Using these 40 questions and ten factors, titled “A Scale for Measuring Problem-Solving Skills of Elementary-School Students”. A second survey was conducted, using this questionnaire, on 60 elementary-school students. These students were also asked to fill out a supplemental questionnaire to determine the extent of their experience in natural settings.
The results of these research showed:
(1) “A Scale for Measuring Problem-Solving Skills of Elementary-School Students” was created with some processes.
(2) The greater the degree of experience in a natural setting that the student had, the higher the level of the student's problem-solving skills. This result is more evident after some processes of creating the questionnaire.
