What makes the problem solving task complex? In order to develop appropriate strategies and rationale students had to:
1.grasp relevant theoretical principles and concepts. In this case, students needed to know how the mind constructs meaning. The constructivist perspective is unfamiliar and quite different than other models of learning.
2. analyze the situation in terms of constructivist learning theory. It is one thing to know about a theory and to be able to describe it. It is more difficult to use a theoretical perspective to analyze a situation. In this case, students had to "think with" the constructivist perspective to analyze children's learning difficulties. Thinking with the concepts is conceptually more complex than simply thinking about them.
3.invent strategies. Rather than select strategies from a predetermined list, students had to invent strategies consistent with a constructivist perspective.
4. recognize the relevance of newly learned concepts to the situation at hand. Students had encountered many new ideas in this segment of the class. This is a case of "far transfer" in which students had to bring forward the "right" set of ideas from among a large body of information.
5. use causal reasoning to explain how their strategies would facilitate the comprehension process. In the end, students had to develop a plausible, causal connection between a particular strategy and children's sense making activity.
In sum, the problem solving task requires invention and causal reasoning in a domain of unfamiliar ideas. Applying or transferring ideas is not a matter of remembering a formula or idea from one context and bringing it into a new one. The student has to invent the answer based on a set of unfamiliar theoretical principles.
A second major factor that contributes to student performance is their prior beliefs about learning. For instance, many students advocated the use of a worksheet to guide the seventh graders' reading. This is not surprising since the worksheet is a common feature in American classrooms. But, students' rationale for the worksheet reveals their underlying ideas about learning. Essentially, they said the worksheet would help the children attend to the main ideas in the reading material. Learning in this case is viewed as taking in information, and the teacher's job is to guide students toward the right information. This kind of "naive empiricism" is a prevalent theory among inexperienced teachers and teacher education students (Levin and Ammon, 1996; 1992).
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