Competence of matric physical science teachers in some basic problem-solving strategies Author: Mailoo Selvaratnam1 Affiliation: 1Faculty of Agriculture, Science and Technology, North West University, Mafikeng campus, South Africa Correspondence to: Mailoo Selvaratnam email: Mailoo.Selvaratnam@nwu.ac.za Postal address: Faculty of Agriculture, Science and Technology, North West University, Private Bag X2046, Mmabatho 2735, South Africa Dates: Received: 12 May 2010 Accepted: 28 Sept. 2010 Published: [To be released] How to cite this article: Selvaratnam M. Competence of matric physical science teachers in some basic problem-solving strategies. S Afr J Sci. 2011;107(1/2), Art. #262, 7 pages. DOI: 10.4102/sajs.v107i1/2.262 © 2011. The Authors. Licensee: OpenJournals Publishing. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License. The National Curriculum Statement for matric physical science places strong emphasis on the development of critical thinking and reasoning abilities of pupils. The successful implementation of this curriculum therefore requires teachers who are competent in the cognitive (intellectual) skills and strategies needed for learning science effectively. Testing of teachers’ competence in this aspect is therefore important. I therefore analysed teachers’ answers to questions that were carefully designed to test competence in some basic intellectual strategies that are important for problem solving in physical science courses. A total of 73 matric physical science teachers, from about 50 Dinaledi schools in the North West and KwaZulu-Natal provinces in South Africa, were tested in five intellectual strategies: clear representation of problems, identifying and focusing on the goal, identification and use of relevant principles, use of equations for deductions and proceeding step-by-step with the solution. The teachers’ competence was poor in all the intellectual strategies tested. About 60% (the average performance in all 13 questions used for testing) of teachers tested were unable to solve the questions correctly. An important objective of the curriculum is the development of critical thinking, scientific reasoning and strategies of pupils. This study shows that the achievement of this objective will be seriously handicapped because of the lack of competence of many teachers in intellectual strategies. There is therefore a need to train teachers in order to increase their competence in this aspect. Introduction Intellectual skills and strategies1 (also called thinking skills and strategies and cognitive skills and strategies) are generally believed to be the tools for all mental activities and competence in them is hence essential for the efficient learning and application of knowledge. Intellectual skills may be considered to be the basic building blocks of all mental activities, and familiar examples of them are reading skills, writing skills, mathematical skills, information gathering skills, organisation skills, reasoning skills, analysis skills and synthesis skills. Intellectual strategies are overall plans of action for managing, controlling and executing tasks such as decision-making and problem solving. They are broader than intellectual skills and the execution of a strategy generally needs competence in many individual skills. There are many types of intellectual skills and strategies and these have been classified in many ways and at different levels of detail. Comprehensive classifications of them are given by Marzano et al.1 and Jones and Idol2. Other classifications are given in some of the articles in a book edited by Costa3,4,5. This book, which has 85 articles by different authors, discusses many important features of intellectual skills and strategies. Just as competence in physical skills is essential for performing physical activities, competence in intellectual skills and strategies is essential for performing mental activities. An increase in competence in this aspect could be expected to lead to more effective and more meaningful learning. It would enable us to organise and store knowledge (in memory) more efficiently and also to recall and apply this stored knowledge more effectively, for example for problem solving.6 Furthermore, this competence would help to build positive attitudes, increase self-confidence and promote the ability to solve problems encountered in our daily lives. The improvement in pupils’ intellectual abilities should be one of the major learning outcomes of educational courses because it is a more permanent aspect of education. The subject content learned is progressively forgotten but improvement in intellectual abilities will be more permanent and will help pupils to lead more successful lives. The need for explicit training of pupils in schools in how to think was recognised in the United States in the early 1980s. The types of thinking skills and strategies that should be explicitly taught in the various subjects in schools (kindergarten to grade 12) were identified, mainly by theoretical analysis, and many programmes have been developed that integrated the teaching of thinking skills and strategies with the teaching of content knowledge. The mastery of thinking skills is a major learning outcome and competence in them is also tested at examinations. All these aspects are discussed in several articles by different authors in the book edited by Costa3. In South Africa, one of the major learning outcomes for matric physical science students in the new national curriculum is7: ‘The learner is able to use process skills, critical thinking, scientific reasoning and strategies to investigate and solve problems in a variety of scientific, technological, environmental and everyday contexts’. Although this emphasises intellectual abilities, the syllabus and work schedules given to teachers are stated mainly in terms of acquisition of content knowledge. Furthermore, how students are evaluated at examinations also seems to place much greater emphasis on content knowledge than on intellectual abilities. The successful implementation of the physical science curriculum depends on many factors, an important one being the competency of teachers. Case studies of the implementation of this curriculum in some classrooms have been done for science by Rogan8 and by Velupillai et al.9 for mathematics. Their studies indicate many serious difficulties associated with the implementation of the new curriculum, one of them being associated with under-qualified and inadequately trained teachers. The Centre for Development and Enterprise has conducted a study10 on this curriculum and have made many recommendations on what needs to be done to reform mathematics and science education in South African schools. Some of these recommendations concern teachers and one of them is the assessment of teachers’ knowledge followed by training programmes to rectify limitations in their knowledge and competence. The research reported in this article concerns the testing of matric physical science teachers’ competence in intellectual skills and strategies that are important for problem solving in physical science. This paper considers only the teachers’ performance in the questions that tested competence in strategies. Their performance in the questions that tested intellectual skills will be reported in a later paper. The study is important because teachers must be competent in intellectual skills and strategies for the successful implementation of the physical science curriculum, in which an important learning outcome is the development of pupils’ intellectual abilities. This type of study has not been previously conducted on teachers in South Africa. Some studies have, however, been conducted on first-year university students by Drummond11,12 and on Science Foundation students by Selvaratnam and Mavuso13. These studies show that more than half of the students tested were not competent in most of the intellectual skills and strategies that are needed for the effective study of science. Objectives The main objectives of the study were: • To test, by carefully designed questions, the competence of matric physical science teachers in some basic intellectual strategies that are important for problem solving in physical science courses. • To identify possible reasons for teachers’ difficulties with strategies and to suggest methods for addressing these difficulties. Strategies tested The strategies selected for testing are those that are particularly important for problem solving in physics and chemistry.14 Non-use of these strategies would lead to difficulties in problem solving and also often cause errors. The intellectual strategies tested were: • clear representation of problems • identification and focusing on the goal • identification and use of relevant principles