PROBLEM‐SOLVING, ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE AND SITUATED REASONING. A STUDY OF JOINT COGNITIVE ACTIVITY IN THE FORMAL SETTING

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Abstract
Summary. The article reports a study of group work in the school context aimed at solving the everyday problem of establishing the postage rate for a letter using a letter‐scale and a postage table. The participants, pupils aged 12–13 years in the sixth form of the Swedish comprehensive school, co‐operated in groups of three that were homogenised with respect to academic ability. The results reveal that all groups draw on school knowledge when solving the task, but that this does not necessarily lead to success in finding the correct postage rate. Furthermore, the higher the academic ability of students, the longer and more roundabout the problem‐solving procedures are. Inappropriate solutions and procedures for handling the table appear just as frequently in all groups as suggestions at some stage of the work, but they are generally rejected during the longer and more elaborate interpretative work among the pupils of high academic ability. It is argued that the relationship between knowledge acquired in the formal setting and the handling of this everyday problem is diffuse. Successful solution of the problem cannot be described as the application of a standardised algorithm but seems more to rely on extensive interpretative work involving the comparison of alternative models of reasoning.

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