Teaching Problem Solving Skills to Educationally At-Risk High School Students

The current study examined processes relating problem-solving skills training to the performance of adolescent educationally at-risk students. This study began with a model based on the belief that both educational-risk level and problem solving skills training would influence behavioral efficacy and attempted to investigate processes related to locus of control and selfefficacy that underlie this influence. A quasi experiment first varied the problem solving skills training (trained, not trained) at different levels of student educationally at-risk students (at-risk, non-risk) and then measured problem-solving cognitive skill, locus of control, self-efficacy, and behavioral outcome efficacy on a sample of 88 students. Separate models for at-risk and non-risk students evolved. Models for both groups represent a process in which problem solving skills training influences locus of control (positively for at-risk but not positively for non-risk students) which then increases self-efficacy and subsequent behavioral outcome efficacy. Teaching Problem Solving Teaching Problem Solving Skills to Educationally At-Risk High School Students Educationally at-risk students are young people who have a statistically high probability of encountering failure, attrition or inadequacies with regard to their formal academic education. They constitute an ever-growing problem in society; potentially, in part, due to deficiencies in their ability to solve acute and/or chronic problems in their life. Studies demonstrate that the problem solving attempts of at-risk students lack logical development, thoroughness and sufficient effort (Blum & Spangehl, 1982). Further, “their impulsive, unsystematic [problem solving] styles consistently create more problems than they solve” (McCluskey, Place, McCluskey, & Treffinger, 1998, p 3). The problem solving deficiencies of educationally at-risk students seem to coexist with an external locus of control (Houtz, Ringenback & Feldhousen, 1973). At-risk students maintain the belief that they are victims of fate, or that attaining desired goals and rewards depends upon luck, circumstance or powerful others rather than upon their own efforts. By contrast, people with an internal locus of control believe that they control their own destinies and are responsible for what happens to them. Notably, people high on internal locus are better problem solvers (Houtz et. al, 1973), and external locus is associated with academic failure (Findley & Cooper, 1983). Nowicki and Barnes (1973) demonstrated that through experience, it is possible to transform an orientation from an external to an internal locus of control. They did so by providing students repeatedly with objective opportunities where could see that they were personally responsible for their own successes. The mastery of certain problem solving skill sets offers the same type of specific, comprehensible and utilizable skill sets that can change a control orientation. Moreover, since the most commonly stated reason for dropping out of school is poor academic performance (Hahn, 1987; Pallas, 1990), mastering such problem-solving skills may not only help to change the control orientation, it may also reduce the overall risk some students