Abstract

The purpose of the study is to examine the influence of children's familiarity with a task and teachers' feedback on their problem solving performances. It was assumed that children's' problem solving performance would be different depending on the children's familiarity with a task and the feedback from teachers. The study also examined whether children's' problem solving competence would be different depending on their gender and age. The experiment was conducted with two experimental tools. The subjects were 58 children who were 5 to 6-year-old, enrolled in kindergartens in Koyang city in Kyunggi province. The collected data were processed with SPSS 11.0 program to get the average and the standard deviations, and with one-way ANOVA and two-way ANOVA with repeated measures. The results of the experiment are as follows; First, children's' problem solving competence was different depending on their age. Older children showed higher performance than younger children, while there's no difference in children's performance depending on their gender. Second, the teachers' feedback didn't influence children's problem solving performance. Third, children showed higher performance when familiar tasks were provided, compared to when typical tasks were provided. Finally, this study found that children's task familiarity has an influence on their problem solving performance.

Keywords

• task familiarity;
• problem solving performance;
• feedback

• 문제해결능력;
• 친숙성;
• 정답제시유무;