Weak Problem-solving Skills

From the teachers’ points of view, there were two main factors causing students’ poor problem-solving skills: (a) poor in cognitive and metacognitive skills and (b) digital native characters.

a. Poor in cognitive and metacognitive skills

Four teachers claimed that students had weak problem-solving skills because they could not master the appropriate cognitive and metacognitive skills required in mathematics. The teachers said,

Analysis

I think only 20% of them use their brain to do analytical thinking… If you want to teach this skill and look at their result at the same time, this is what happen now, A+, not A. But these A+ students, when they go out, they cannot survive, why? Because they do not have analytical and logic thinking [Translated from BM] (Teacher F).

Application

They can solve it. But to read the questions and transfer the information, that becomes a problem. Transfer the information - that is what they can’t [Translated from BM] (Teacher F).

Monitoring

Some students are overcomplicating. For simple questions, they are thinking too much. They can answer difficult questions. But for easy question, they feel it is too easy. So, they are not certain whether it is right or wrong (Teacher B).

Control

Once they cannot cope add maths, so many things to remember, so many concepts to apply, so they cannot cope la (Teacher D).

Planning

They won’t use their own strategy. Let say if you don’t understand the won’t learn from others [Translated from BM] (Teacher F).

From the teachers’ points of view, students were weak in the third (i.e. application) and fourth (i.e. analysis) level of thinking skills in Bloom’s Taxonomy as well as metacognitive skills such as monitoring, control and planning. From the teachers’ explanations, students seemed to be capable in LOTS such as memorising and understanding of mathematics knowledge.

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Learning of HOTS and metacognitive skills, especially in problem-solving contexts is not a simple task. Cognitive and metacognitive skills are developed over a period of time (Grace, 2001). Unfortunately, teachers are facing time constraint and they are unable to spend enough time to meet the need of every student. A teacher said,

If you want them to have logic thinking, you have to sit with them. Like yesterday, I spent one to two hours for a question. You have to give them time to think… Now I can’t even look after my students… Reduce the workload of teachers [Translated from BM] (Teacher F).

Teachers were expected to teach HOTS in schools, but they were overburdened with schools’ works. Due to the schools’ aspiration to maintain good exams performance, teachers were forced to teach only the LOTS.

b. Digital natives’ character

Some teachers related the students’ problem-solving skills to the current trend of young generation. Students had the characteristics of a digital native. The teachers said,

Depending whether they are lazy or not (i.e. follow the step-by-step problem- solving strategies). Some are lazy. Some as long as they finish it, they will go to the next question (Teacher A).

They think that they can combine everything into one. They want to be fast. And they don’t want a lot of working… They want to be easy. They want to find the simplest. Actually I want them to step by step (Teacher B).

They cannot think by themselves… I think it relates to the Y generation… They don’t have common sense. Computerised, no common sense... They don’t think whether the answer is logic? True, so how you want to survive in the real world… I said read slowly… They want to be fast. They like to be fast. When something requires reading, has to transfer, they have no patience [Translated from BM] (Teacher F).

The teachers characterised the current young generation of students as needing information easily and quickly without much thought. In this section, the teachers seemed to perceive students’ learning attitudes as the major factors behind their weakness in problem-solving.

Young generation is comfortable and capable of accessing information randomly rather than sequential access to information (Prensky, 2001b, 2001a). This could explain why some students refuse to follow step-by-step problem-solving instructions that have been laid down by their teachers. Young generation always wants to thrive

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on instant gratification and receive information fast (Prensky, 2001a, 2001b; Beck and Wade, 2006). Thus, students usually cannot bear with the slow and tedious learning instructions. Sometimes, teachers may have mistaken the students for being lazy (e.g. Teacher A).

The current young generation chooses different skills to learn and uses different methods to learn (Beck and Wade, 2006; Bennett et al., 2008). They receive a significant digital input while growing up, so their brain operations process information differently (Prensky, 2001b). Digital technologies have changed the way young people learn (Helsper and Eynon, 2010). Computer technologies are making our lives more convenient and comfortable because they are getting better, faster and easier to use. Since young, the technologies have taught and trained the current generation of students to learn in a fast and easy way. So, they cannot bear having slow and tedious learning instructions in the schools.

The generation gap between teachers and students is not only in age, but how they grew up with or without digital technologies.

It’s not just that boomers and gamers grew up differently; those differences have led to very different worldviews (Beck and Wade, 2006,

p.19).

The current young generation prefers self-educating as they learn best through trial and error, and usually disregard formal instructions (Beck and Wade, 2006). They would likely favour interactive learning environment such as computer games because they can access information easily and quickly without much thought.