Technology Education and Problem Solving

I have been thinking a lot about how to teach my Technology Education students how to problem solve; this is really important when you are trying to teach your students in situated learning?  When they leave my classroom and return to their offices, they will undoubtedly have problems implementing their new skills nearly right away.  As a result, I am working on adding problems that occur during class.  I have to manipulate the class files and syllabus to create “problems.”  I am afraid that problems always arise during class, but I cannot depend on that.  I must manipulate the learning experience.

However, I have found that problem solving just does not work well with novice users in a level 1 class.  Woolfolk (2007) teaches us that effective problem solvers are experts in the problem domain.  This is because experts have large stores of domain knowledge, quickly recognize patterns, use organized knowledge schemas, use elaborated and well-practiced knowledge, and spend time analyzing using existing knowledge.

But this does not mean that you should not give problems to your novice students because they will arise in class anyway.  In your learning goals, you should include a problem solving tutorial.  In this tutorial, you will want to teach your students HOW to problem solve.

First, you teach your students how to construct a representation of the problem.  The steps for defining goals and representing the problem are:

1. Focusing attention
2. Understanding the words
3. Understanding the whole problem
4. Translation and schema training
5. Demonstration of problem representation

Problem Solving Steps (Woolfook, 2007)

While searching for a solution, your students should use effective problem solving techniques:

• Anticipate, Act, Look Back
  • Anticipate (envision) the consequences
  • Act on the best solution
  • Look back and evaluate your success
• Overcome factors that hinder solutions
  • Functional fixedness & response set
  • Confirmation bias & belief perseverance
  • Lack of flexibility

Once you teach your students HOW to problem solve, you should present a problem for them to figure out. With novices, I would start with an easier problem that can be solved using concepts you have already taught.  This will give you another chance to re-teach those topics.

But this method of teaching how to problem solve and then solving a problem is quite useful for experts. Even the experts do not really know how to solve problems.  They may not know that they know enough to find a solution.  You need to teach them how to access that information by using the problem solving techniques found above.

References

Woolfolk, A. (2007). Educational Psychology. Boston, MA: Pearson.