How Handwriting Behaviors During Problem Solving Are Related to Problem-Solving Success in an Engineering Course

Publication date: Available online 27 April 2019Source: Contemporary Educational PsychologyAuthor(s): Thomas F. Stahovich, Timothy Van Arsdale, Richard E. MayerAbstractIf we carefully observe the spatial and temporal organization of students' pen strokes as they solve an engineering problem, can we predict their ability to achieve the correct answer? To address this question, 122 college students were asked to solve exam problems in an engineering course using a smartpen that recorded their writing as digitized timestamped pen strokes. The pen stroke data was used to compute a collection of 10 metrics characterizing various elements of problem-solving fluency including the tendency to progress down the page without revisions, the amount of time with no activity, and the frequency of constructing and using equations. The primary finding is that, on average across 13 different exam problems, these elements of problem-solving process explained 40% of the variance in scores of the correctness of the problem solution. In short, success on generating correct solutions was related to the fluency of the student's problem-solving process (i.e., working sequentially from the top to the bottom of the page, working without detours or long pauses, and working by constructing equations). This work is consistent with the idea that expertise in solving common engineering problems involves being able to treat them like routine rather than non-routine problems.
Source: Contemporary Educational Psychology - Category: Child Development Source Type: research