TY - JOUR
T1 - Individual differences in students' complex problem solving skills
T2 - How they evolve and what they imply
AU - Wüstenberg, Sascha
AU - Greiff, Samuel
AU - Vainikainen, Mari Pauliina
AU - Murphy, Kevin
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 American Psychological Association.
PY - 2016/10/1
Y1 - 2016/10/1
N2 - Changes in the demands posed by increasingly complex workplaces in the 21st century have raised the importance of nonroutine skills such as complex problem solving (CPS). However, little is known about the antecedents and outcomes of CPS, especially with regard to malleable external factors such as classroom climate. To investigate the relations between CPS and other constructs, we had Finnish 6th-grade students complete a test battery that included CPS tasks, fluid reasoning, classroom climate, and academic outcomes such as school grades and academic potential (N = 1,670). The working memory test was administered to a subsample of students (N = 357). A latent multilevel analysis suggests that (a) fluid reasoning, working memory, and classroom climate influenced CPS skills, and (b) CPS skills exhibited some incremental value in explaining school grades after controlling for cognitive ability, although the largest part of CPS' relations to the outcomes was due to its overlap with other cognitive abilities. Further, on the class level, classroom climate showed a significant indirect effect on school grades via its influence on between-class differences in CPS. On the basis of this pattern of results, we argue that classroom climate is likely to be an important antecedent of CPS skills. Hence, we suggest that future research further explore how CPS is related to malleable factors such as classroom climate and extend analyses on the predictive validity of CPS to include real-world outcomes beyond the academic setting.
AB - Changes in the demands posed by increasingly complex workplaces in the 21st century have raised the importance of nonroutine skills such as complex problem solving (CPS). However, little is known about the antecedents and outcomes of CPS, especially with regard to malleable external factors such as classroom climate. To investigate the relations between CPS and other constructs, we had Finnish 6th-grade students complete a test battery that included CPS tasks, fluid reasoning, classroom climate, and academic outcomes such as school grades and academic potential (N = 1,670). The working memory test was administered to a subsample of students (N = 357). A latent multilevel analysis suggests that (a) fluid reasoning, working memory, and classroom climate influenced CPS skills, and (b) CPS skills exhibited some incremental value in explaining school grades after controlling for cognitive ability, although the largest part of CPS' relations to the outcomes was due to its overlap with other cognitive abilities. Further, on the class level, classroom climate showed a significant indirect effect on school grades via its influence on between-class differences in CPS. On the basis of this pattern of results, we argue that classroom climate is likely to be an important antecedent of CPS skills. Hence, we suggest that future research further explore how CPS is related to malleable factors such as classroom climate and extend analyses on the predictive validity of CPS to include real-world outcomes beyond the academic setting.
KW - Classroom climate
KW - Complex problem solving
KW - Fluid reasoning
KW - School grades
KW - Working memory
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84949894811&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1037/edu0000101
DO - 10.1037/edu0000101
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84949894811
SN - 0022-0663
VL - 108
SP - 1028
EP - 1044
JO - Journal of Educational Psychology
JF - Journal of Educational Psychology
IS - 7
ER -