THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FORMAL THINKING ABILITIES AND PROBLEM-SOLVING SKILLS IN KINEMATICS TOPIC

The main purpose of the study was to investigate the relationship between formal thinking students’ ability level and their competence in problem solving task in physics. The population was all student prospective teacher students of the first grade in physics education program. A relationship was thought to exist since both sets of skills strongly emphasize conducting fair experiments as well as other abilities. Pencil and paper measures of formal operational and problem solving skill achievement in the kinematics topic were given to 36 students. Resulting correlations showed a moderate relationship between achievements on the two measurements. Factor analysis data corroborate the correlation evidence. One potential inference to be drawn from these results is that problem solving skill teaching might be influenced formal thinking ability.