Recent curriculum reform agendas appear to exert pressure on teachers to incorporate Mathematical Problem Solving (MPS) meaningfully into their lessons, with the view to engaging pupils with real life problems, guessing, discovering, and making sense of mathematics. However, a comprehensive review of both government and academic literature indicate that understanding teachers' reform implementation decisions is largely unexplored, particularly within the Ghanaian context. The purpose of this mixed-methods sequential explanatory study was to identify factors contributing to teacher intentions to teach MPS by obtaining quantitative results from a survey of 375 primary teachers and then following up with six purposefully selected teachers to explore those results in more depth through interviews. Based on the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB), the quantitative phase of the study explored how certain different but interrelated belief variables such as attitudes towards the behaviour (AB), perceived norms (PN) and perceived behavioural control (PBC) lead to an explanation of teacher intentions to teach MPS, and an understanding of the contributions of relevant socio-demographic factors in defining these intentions in this context. In the follow up, qualitative phase, semi-structured interviews with six teachers were conducted to explore in depth the results from the statistical analyses. Results indicated that several beliefs about teaching MPS significantly contributed to AB, PN and PBC. Two factors, AB and PBC were found to have significant influences and accounted for 80% of the variance in the teachers' intent to teach MPS. Differences appeared to exist between private and public school teachers' for both intent and the three constructs (AB, PN, and PBC), whilst familiarity with the curriculum had an effect on teachers intentions only. In the qualitative phase, the study addressed some factors found to potentially influence teachers' intentions including MPS conceptions, past experience in mathematics, availability of resources, adequate classroom spaces and professional development opportunities. The quantitative and qualitative findings from the two phases of the study are discussed with reference to prior research. The results provide an understanding of the relevant social-cognitive processes which may influence a teacher's reform decisions, and in particular suggest strong implications for developing the capacity of schools to support teachers' intentions to implement curriculum reform policies.

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Science in Information Technology in Education

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After failing to solve items from the Remote Associates Test (RAT), subjects showed significant priming effects when the solutions were presented in a lexical-decision task (Experiment 1). Experiments 2 and 3 found no significant priming effect when subjects were asked merely to remember the RAT elements, or for targets that were associates of only two of the three elements in incoherent RAT items. Experiment 4 showed that identifying a correct solution took longer than lexical decision, and that the probability of correct identifications for a given item was uncorrelated to the priming effect for the item. Experiment 5 yielded item-difficulty norms for 68 RAT items as well as a replication of the priming effect observed for unsolved items in Experiment 1. In Experiment 6, a significant priming was observed for targets that were solutions to hard items but not for solutions to easy items. This research provides evidence for implicit problem-solving, which is nonconscious but not automatic, and is neither a perceptual nor a purely memory-related phenomenon.

A hierarchy of skills in the measurement topic of area was validated on three-hundred and six students between grades six and nine. The hierarchy of skills was based on the rules underlying the individual skills. When a rule for one skill was considered a component of a rule for another skill, then the two skills were hypothesized to be hierarchically ordered. In addition, if a simple rule for a particular skill was replaced by a more complex rule, resulting in a different skill, then these two skills were hypothesized to be hierarchically ordered. The physical representations of the area tasks, as well as the shapes of the area figures were hypothesized as influencing the skill orderings. The use of Latent-class analysis revealed that seven of the nine skill orderings analyzed were hierarchically ordered based on difficulty level and not prerequisiteness. The other two skill orderings indicated equaprobable partial mastery classes. In addition to Latent-class analysis, the incorrect processes used by the students were coded and tabulated. The results revealed that (1) nonstandard shaped area problems were the most difficult for this sample, (2) the most frequent process associated with incorrect responses involved the addition of numbers shown in area problem figures, (3) the second most frequent process involved some form of multiplication, without regard to the area concepts inherent in the task, and (4) students beyond the sixth grade made more errors involving multiplication processes than errors involving addition processes. The study revealed that the use of rules, representations and shapes as the basis for a hierarchy does appear to have merit. In addition, process analysis revealed that students respond in a large variety of ways when they do not know the correct process for area tasks.

The malleable nature of human memory has been the focus of considerable research in recent years. Memory is no longer viewed as permanent and non-modifiable. When a consolidated memory is reactivated it becomes labile and modifiable again. Recently, updating of reactivated memory has been demonstrated, manifesting as the addition of new but relevant information. New, similar, information that is acquired in a separate learning episode is embedded within the original memory. We were interested in exploring the effects of psychosocial stress on this episodic memory updating. Individuals were stressed prior to reactivation of the original memory (Experiment 1) or prior to the onset of reconsolidation of the original memory (Experiment 2). Based on prior research, we hypothesized that in both experiments stress would impair memory updating. In Experiment 1, stress reduced memory updating, but this effect did not achieve statistical significance. In Experiment 2, stress impaired the consolidation of an `updated' memory. These findings not only corroborate stress-induced impairments of memory but also shed light on the possible consequences of impaired memory updating. We discuss the relevance of these experimental results in the context of problem solving.

The purpose of this study was to assess the impact of the Ridley and colleagues Mutual Problem Solving Program on assessments of relationship satisfaction and perceptions of equity in remarital couples. It was predicted that since the program imposed by its processes and its content, an equitable system by which couples could resolve conflicts, that equity perceptions should improve; and, according to the theoretical propositions of equity theory, it was expected that as equity improved, so should overall relationship satisfaction. Ten couples completed the eight week training program, completing a packet of thirteen questionnaires and one audio-taped discussion of a couple problem, once at pre-test and again at post-test. Using a case study format four couples' results were discussed regarding predictions established by equity theory. It was concluded that at a descriptive level, equity was able to predict the responses of low/no distress remarital couples to the program, but that individual or couple factors were more explanatory than equity propositions when distress was high. Implications for future empirical research was discussed.