Abstract
There is a growing demand for assessment instruments which can be used in higher education, which cover a broader area of competencies than the traditional tests for disciplinary knowledge and domain-specific skills, and which measure students' most important general cognitive capabilities. Around the age of the transition from secondary to tertiary education, such assessments may serve several functions, including selecting the best-prepared candidates for certain fields of study. Dynamic problem-solving (DPS) is a good candidate for such a role, as tasks that assess it involve knowledge acquisition and knowledge utilization as well. The purpose of this study is to validate an online DPS test and to explore its potential for assessing students' DPS skills at the beginning of their higher education studies. Participants in the study were first-year students at a major Hungarian university (n = 1468). They took five tests that measured knowledge from their previous studies: Hungarian language and literature, mathematics, history, science and English as a Foreign Language (EFL). A further, sixth test based on the MicroDYN approach, assessed students' DPS skills. A brief questionnaire explored learning strategies and collected data on students' background. The testing took place at the beginning of the first semester in three 2-h sessions. Problem-solving showed relatively strong correlations with mathematics (r = 0.492) and science (r = 0.401), and moderate correlations with EFL (r = 0.227), history (r = 0.192), and Hungarian (r = 0.125). Weak but still significant correlations were found with certain learning strategies, positive correlations with elaboration strategies, and a negative correlation with memorization strategies. Significant differences were observed between male and female students; men performed significantly better in DPS than women. Results indicated the dominant role of the first phase of solving dynamic problems, as knowledge acquisition correlated more strongly with any other variable than knowledge utilization.
Highlights
The social and economic developments of the past decades have re-launched the debate on the mission of schooling, on the types of skills schools are expected to develop in their students in order to prepare them for an unknown future
Performance in two phases of problem-solving correlated at the moderate level (r = 0.432, p < 0.001); it is worth examining the correlations between the matriculation examination results and the phases of problem-solving separately
We only deal systematically with the three mandatory matriculation examination subjects, as these data are available for all participants, while only a small proportion of students took the exams in a science discipline or English as a Foreign Language (EFL) as an elective
Summary
The social and economic developments of the past decades have re-launched the debate on the mission of schooling, on the types of skills schools are expected to develop in their students in order to prepare them for an unknown future. The context of the research is set by the practical needs of (1) developing new assessment methods for higher education, including innovative and efficient selection processes for choosing students for higher education studies, and assessing university outcomes beyond disciplinary knowledge and domain-specific skills. Solving problems in the process of being assessed in DPS based on computer-simulated scenarios involves the component skills of scientific reasoning, knowledge acquisition and knowledge utilization, all necessary for successful higher education studies (see e.g., Buchner and Funke, 1993; Funke, 2001; Greiff et al, 2012; Csapó and Funke, 2017a; Funke and Greiff, 2017). Two scales for learning strategies that use self-reported Likert scales were adapted from the PISA 2000 assessment (elaboration strategies and memorization strategies, see Artelt et al, 2003)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
