Two Grade 10 classes in an urban Jamaican High School were taught over a period of one academic year in two problem solving styles: an
Explicit Style
derived from Charles, and an
Implicit Style
derived from Isaacs. At the end of the academic year there was no significant difference in their performance on a problem solving test, or on the
Problem Solving Profile
of the Caribbean Examinations Council's
Basic Proficiency
papers. The two classes performed much better than the population who sat the Basic papers on the tasks measuring
Recall
and
Algorithmic Thinking
but only moderately better than the population on tasks measuring
Problem Solving
.
The teaching project described in this paper was supported in part by grants from the Research and Publications Fund Committee of the University of the West Indies (Mona), and the Wolmers Trust, Kingston. The author wishes to thank the Registrar and the Pro-Registrar of the Caribbean Examinations Council for permission to use the CXC papers and data in this study. A modified version of this paper was presented at the 63rd Annual Conference of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics held in San Antonio, Texas in 1985.