Research Symposium

BIO

I am a double major in Criminology and Psychology from Fort Lauderdale, FL. I aspire to be a Clinical Psychologist and spread resources and information about mental health in unfortunate communities. I am interested in doing more studies that deal with mental health, emotions, or anything law related.

Investigating Potential Strategy Flexibility in Linear Algebra

Abstract

Previous studies have found that students know multiple strategies to solve a given problem but do not always use the best strategy to solve it (Liu et al., 2018; Hickendorff, 2020). The current study is interested in investigating potential strategy flexibility. We define potential strategy flexibility as consisting of knowledge of strategy validity, knowledge of multiple strategies, and knowledge of strategy efficiency. We predict that students with more knowledge of multiple strategies will have high knowledge of strategy validity and strategy efficiency. In the current study, college students were given three different tasks in algebra. To assess their knowledge of multiple strategies, participants were given 12 linear equation problems and asked to generate as many solutions as possible. To assess their knowledge of strategy validity, participants received 36 solved linear equation problems. The solutions reflected standard strategies, innovative strategies, and wrongly executed strategies, and participants were asked to judge the validity of each solution. We tested their knowledge of strategy efficiency by showing them two different solutions for the same problem, reflecting the standard and innovative strategy, and asking them to choose the strategy they think is better. The current study is still ongoing, result will be available by the time of the symposium.

Keywords: Potential strategy flexibility, Psychology, Algebra