CHARACTERIZING THE INTUITIVE REPRESENTATION IN PROBLEM-SOLVING - EVIDENCE FROM EVALUATING MATHEMATICAL STRATEGIES

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the nature of the intuit ive problem representation used in evaluating mathematical strategies. The first experiment tested between two representations: a representa tion composed of principles and an integrated representation. Subjects judged the correctness of unseen math strategies based only on the an swers they produced for a set of temperature mixture problems. The dis tance of the given answers from the correct answers and whether the an swers violated one of the principles of temperature mixture were manip ulated. The results supported the principle representation hypothesis. In the second experiment we manipulated subjects' understanding of an acid mixture task with a brief paragraph of instruction on one of the principles. Subjects then completed an estimation task intended to me asure their understanding of the problem domain. The evaluation task f rom the first experiment was then presented, but with acid mixture ins tead of temperature mixture. The results showed that intuitive underst anding of the domain mediates the effect of instruction on evaluating problems. Additionally, the results supported the hypothesis that subj ects perform a mapping process between their intuitive understanding a nd math strategies.