Open-ended investigations: Performance and effects of pre-training

Students' performance and the effects of pre-training were studied for tasks rated high in ambiguity, in particular those where the solution to the tasks cannot be arrived at through predictable algorithms. A total of 277 thirteen-year-old students from two urban schools in Singapore were randomly assigned to two groups. One group was provided with instruction for dealing with such tasks in general before performing a series of tasks, while the other group performed the tasks without the instruction. How well the students coped with the ambiguities of the tasks with and without pretraining is reported in this paper.