New Perspectives in Science Education

People are daily confronted with problems, which are situations that a person does not exactly know how to solve but still tries to find a solution. Thus, problem-solving is finding solutions to difficult or complex problems or issues, which is considered a key thinking ability. The root cause analysis (RCA) strategy aims to understand why an adverse event came about, which is often used in science and engineering to identify faults or problems. In this research, we selected the RCA for solving a problem as a means to study the students’ problem-solving in Chemistry and the students’ faults and problems to solve the question, as well as to help and improve them for future problems. The sample of this study is 89 students enrolled in the science-mathematics program of the secondary school. The students were expected to find the color of the mixed solution (acid-base) when dropping different indicators. The qualitative methodology of this study involves focus groups and content analysis to evaluate the data. The results show that the majority of students correctly understood the problem and over half of the students accurately understood the problem. In all the procedures, 100 % of the students did well because they could find all of the data and write the data completely. Considering the RCA strategy for problem-solving, firstly, they could correctly define the problem and designate data collection. In addition, they identified possible causal factors and the root causes of this problem. However, 37 % of the students couldn’t correctly solve the problem. When studying the faults of problem-solving, it was found that application, analysis, practice, remembering, and time were the students’ faults in this problem-solving. Additionally, in the next step, we want to study the implementation for improving the faults of students’ problem-solving to better prepare them for efficient problem-solving.