Page 121 - International Journal of Process Educaiton (Special Issue)

Problem Solving (1990)
Problem Solving is a content-independent process of identifying and defining a gap between
expectations and perceptions in a given situation, and then developing the means to minimize this
gap to satisfy that situation’s key stakeholders.
Defining and Teaching Problem Solving
In his book, How to Solve It (1945), Mathematician and
educator George Pólya framed problem solving as a
methodical and teachable process. His approach consisted
of four broad steps:
 Understand the problem.
 Devise a plan for solving it.
 Carry out the plan.
 Review/extend the work.
Pólya went into much greater detail for each step, and
his work and conception of problem solving as a general
process still resonates with educators who strive to teach
problem solving within their classrooms. Few would dispute
the claim that problem solving is a skill that the majority of personal expertise (the current version of this methodology
students lack. Scholars from McMaster’s University spent
25 years surveying the need for students to develop problem
solving skills, how problem solving is taught (even asking
whether it can be taught), the methods used, and what works
(as well as what doesn’t). According to the authors,
(O)ur research showed that: 1) there is an
identified, subject-independent skill set called
problem solving, and 2) that students do not
develop the skill in a four-year program by having
teachers display how they solve problems, by
giving out sample solutions, by using open-ended
problems or by having peers show their problem
solving. (Woods, Hrymak, Marshall, Wood,
Crowe, Hoffman, et al., 1997)
Problems in Teaching and Learning the Problem
Solving Process
Approximately midway between the publication of Pólya’s
work and the project report from McMaster’s is where we
find Pacific Crest Software offering the software packages
Point Five and PC:SOLVE. Both were systems created to
help learners solve problems (see the Role of Technology
section). After marketing Point Five for approximately
six months, an important discovery was made: clients
who used the software reported that they wished they
had gained the level of problem solving expertise that
the software helped them develop while they were still
undergraduate or graduate students. Dan Apple, president
of Pacific Crest recalls,
International Journal of Process Education (February 2016, Volume 8 Issue 1)
CD
That’s why we offered workshops on the problem
solving process…the more workshops we held,
the clearer it became that POINT FIVE and
the problem solving skills it supported and
built needed to be integrated into collegiate
quantitative courses. By 1990, more than 500
colleges and universities had purchased a site
license for PC:SOLVE (the upgraded version of
Point Five), all in quantitative programs. In every
case, the primary reason faculty had integrated
PC:SOLVE into their courses was to target the
problem solving process. (personal recollection)
Sharing his own skills in solving large-scale public systems
problems (Apple, 1980), Apple developed An Introduction
to Problem Solving Using PC:SOLVE (1990) to teach
students how to identify, define, and solve problems by
using the Problem Solving Methodology (PSM), which
represented an amalgamation of research, practice, and
is shown in Figure 1). In doing so, he learned that putting
a methodology into the hands of students, though helpful,
wasn’t enough; students needed to learn how to use the
methodology, and faculty faced the very real struggle of
how to teach problem solving from within the context
of their discipline in a way that worked. The McMaster
summary of teaching practices in problem solving strongly
suggested that something else was needed to improve
students' problem solving performance. The Problem
Solving Across the Curriculum Conferences (1990-1996)
helped faculty share scholarship and practices in learning
and problem solving, thereby creating that “something
else.”
Learning and Problem Solving: Interdependency
As noted in the Learning Process Methodology section,
publication of Learning Through Problem Solving (Apple,
Beyerlein & Schlesinger, 1992) was a formal result of
the collaboration by faculty who had attended the 1990
conference. Learning through Problem Solving offered
the Learning Process Model (a model of the learning
process) and the Problem Solving Methodology (a model
of the problem solving process). The relationship between
these two processes is more than close; they are actually
interdependent. The model in Figure 2 was presented in
Education as a Process (Apple & Hurley-Lawrence, 1994),
demonstrating that learning is the process of constructing
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