IUCEE Felder-Brent Webinars

Webinar #9 Handout (RF-RB)

DEVELOPING PROBLEM-SOLVING EXPERTISE

Principal reference: Teaching and Learning STEM (TLS), Chapter 9

What Attributes Distinguish Expert Problem Solvers from Novices?

How Can I Help My Students Develop Those Attributes?
Review: What two conditions are required to produce high-level skill development?
Challenge. High-level skills are produced only through practice and feedback.
(a) Write high-level learning objectives.
(b) Create tasks (in-class activities and out-of-class assignments) and formative
and summative assessments that address the objectives.
Support.
(a) Show good and bad responses to high-level challenges.
(b) Provide practice in the tasks and conduct the formative assessments. Then & only then,
conduct the summative assessments.
What traits do expert problem solvers have that novices (beginners) do not have?
1. Problem-classification skill. Experts categorize problem types based on their underlying principles
and key features, identify good solution strategies for each category, put new problems in
appropriate categories, and quickly select appropriate solution strategies for them.
2. Metacognition skill. Experts monitor and evaluate their thinking before and during problem
solving, follow successful pathways, and quickly adjust unsuccessful ones.
3. Automaticity. Experts solve problems in familiar categories with little conscious thought or effort.
4. Self-efficacy. Experts are confident in their ability to meet specific challenges or types of
challenges (such as problems in familiar categories or oral tests).
How can we teach students to become expert problem solvers?
• Teach students problem classification. When they submit problem solutions, have them begin by
classifying the problems and outlining the solution strategy they will use. (Develops problem
classification and metacognition skills)
• Teach students metacognition. Teach the full problem-solving process, including classifying the
problem, choosing the solution approach, checking solution steps, and checking the final solution.
Have the students show their checking in the solutions they turn in. (Develops problem classification
and metacognition skills and leads to self-efficacy)
• Promote a growth mindset in students. Students with a fixed mindset believe that native talent mostly
accounts for good performance (“I’ll probably fail calculus because I’m just no good at math.”)
Students with a growth mindset believe that effort contributes significantly to good performance
(“I’ll raise my calculus grade if I study harder and get some tutoring.”) Students with a fixed mindset
are much more likely than their classmates with growth mindsets to give up when they’re struggling
in a course. (Leads to self-efficacy)
• Use interleaving when teaching problem solving. Periodically return to the same problem types as
the course progresses, showing them in a variety of contexts. Avoid overlearning. Don’t stick to one
type of problem for an extended time, then drop it until the exam. (Teaches problem classification,
leads to automaticity and self-efficacy)

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 • Teach students how to study for problem-solving exams. Tell them not to just reread texts and old
problem solutions—those strategies don’t retrieve the solutions from long-term memory and so
don’t promote remembering them later. Instead, use spaced retrieval practice—solve the problems
without looking at the solutions. Students who get stuck on a problem can look at the solution, put
the problem aside for a few hours or days, then try again. (Leads to automaticity and self-efficacy)

What is Inductive Teaching? How Does It Promote

Expert Problem-Solving Skill? (TLS, Sect. 9.3)
Course topics and entire courses can be taught
• Deductively — start with principles, deduce & derive methods & applications. Traditional in science
and engineering education.
• Inductively — start with challenges, introduce principles and methods on a need-to-know basis in the
context of the challenges. Common forms of induction include inquiry-based, problem-based and
project-based learning (PBL), case-based instruction, and just-in-time teaching. Inductive teaching
methods are particularly effective at promoting conceptual understanding, long-term retention of
information, and transfer of solution methods to different problem types.

Deductive presentation does not convey a good sense of how science, engineering, and learning in general
really happen. Inductive presentation does. Many published studies have shown inductive teaching to be
superior to deductive teaching at producing almost any desirable learning outcome other than pure
memorization.
The challenges that begin inductive approaches can have significant impacts on students’
motivation to learn the topic being addressed. Example challenges include explaining how familiar objects
work (e.g., microwave ovens and jet engines), and why familiar phenomena occur as they do (e.g., why
20oC air feels comfortable and 20oC swimming pool water feels freezing, and why a helium balloon rises
and eventually stops rising), and why some experiments and computer programs fail to produce expected
results, and why some research and medical and industrial procedures fail, and why some buildings and
bridges collapse.

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 Participants’ Questions and Presenters’ Answers
Q1: Can we ask students to write computer programs and vary the input values and analyze the solutions for
the given problem?
A1: Yes, especially if you first have them do it in one or more active learning exercises in class so they get
practice and immediate feedback if they make a mistake. Then, have them do it in assignments.
Q2: One of the first things my students do when given a hard homework problem is ask ChatGPT to solve it.
What should I do about that?
A2: Good question—in fact, it’s such a good question that almost every teacher and professor in the world is
currently asking some form of it. Here is our suggestion:
• Formulate rules about how students may and may not use AI when doing homework assignments
(they should not be allowed to use it on exams unless the exams are specifically about AI). Your
university or department and some of your colleagues may already have formulated and tested
rules—find out about them before you try to make up your own.
• The rules should include a requirement that whenever your students use AI to help them solve an
assigned problem, they should submit with the solution a clear statement of where and how they used
AI: what LLM did they use (ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude,…?), what prompt did they give it, and if they
checked the AI solution, how did they do it? Make clear that if they use AI and don’t report it, it will
be considered cheating.
• Go over the rules with your class before they complete their first assignment. When you detect a
violation of the rules, treat it as cheating. If you don’t, the whole class will soon know that they can
ignore the rules.
Q3: Should we refresh our students’ mathematical basics before we include the math on tests?
A3: Only if you have a reason to believe that many students are likely to need refreshing. What you should do
is make clear before each test what math they will need to solve the test problems. The most effective
way to do that is by handing out study guides before each test that preview the types of problems they
should be prepared to solve, and when they search for those types they should see what math methods
they should study.
Q4: Does assigning open-ended problems help students to become better problem solvers?
A4: Definitely—it’s the only way to help them learn to solve open-ended problems, and most of the problems
they will be called on to solve in their professional careers will be open-ended. However, it’s not enough
to just assign such problems—use active learning to teach the students how to solve them before you put
them on tests.
Q5: What role does failure play in the development of expert problem-solving skills?
A5: An absolutely essential one–the same role it plays in the development of any other nontrivial skill,
physical or cognitive, whether it’s walking, reading, riding a bicycle, deriving an equation, writing a
code, or designing an operating system. Everything nontrivial we know how to do (well, almost
everything) we learned by trying to do it, failing, being told or figuring out for ourselves what we did
wrong, trying again, and continuing until we get it right.
Q6: How can we balance procedural knowledge with creative problem solving?
A6: We don’t want to say much about creative problem solving now because we first want to discuss what
that is and how to teach it, and we don’t do that until we get to Chapter 10 of TLS and Webinar 10. For
now, let’s look at a more general version of your question and answer it in a way that would apply to
your question as a special case.
Q6a: There are two important skills in a course I’m teaching. How can I decide how much time to spend on
each one?
A6a: The same way we suggest for deciding how much time to spend on any topic in any course you teach.
The key is learning objectives. Think about the kinds of things you will ask students to do (questions
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 you will ask, problems and projects you will assign) when you assess their mastery of a skill. Then write
learning objectives that capture the tasks on both of your lists and estimate how much time it will take
you to teach the students to meet those objectives. Your estimates will be your answer to Q6a, and if you
say Skill 1 and Skill 2 are respectively the skills needed to meet your objectives for your procedural
knowledge and your creative problem solving, you’ll have your answer to Q6.
Q7: How do you differentiate between Level 4 and Level 6 questions?
A7: Level 4 usually involves taking something that already exists and answering some questions about it.
“What should happen if I run this process the way it was designed to run?” “Why didn’t this experiment
have the predicted result?” “Why did I get this error message when I ran this program?” Level 6 always
involves creating something new. Key verbs include design (a process), invent (a device), write (a
program), formulate (a safety plan), and so on.
Q8: Do you advise starting a class with a problem/application and as we discuss can we keep connecting
parts of the course content?
A8: Yes—that’s the definition of inductive teaching and learning, and we hope we made our support for that
approach clear in the webinar. (We do it even more strongly in Section 9.3 of TLS.) However, we don’t
recommend it for every bit of knowledge in every class we teach. If we’re teaching something that’s
fairly obvious and only has to be memorized, there’s no need to teach it inductively or with active
learning—just tell it to the students or show it to them and make clear they need to memorize it. The
more complex something is, the more important it is to teach it inductively.
Q9: What is the preparedness necessary for a teacher to consider inductive teaching?
A9: If you’ve participated in this webinar and read Section 9.3 of TLS, you have all the preparation you
need to teach inductively. However, inductive teaching is not a specific technique but a large spectrum
of techniques, ranging widely in their levels of difficulty for students. On one end of the spectrum is
inquiry-based learning, which simply means starting a topic with a simple challenge (a question, a
problem) and using the challenge as a framework for teaching the topic. At the other end of the spectrum
is problem-based learning, in which students (usually in teams) are challenged with a complex problem
without first being taught how to solve it. At each stage of the solution process they have to figure out
what they know, what they still need to find out, and how to proceed, getting help from the instructor
only when they can’t figure something out themselves.
If you’re new to inductive teaching, start with simple inquiry, and gradually make the problem difficulty
level as great as you want to in that course. (Not every instructor has to go all the way to strict problem-
based learning.)
Q10: How long does it usually take to teach your students to become expert problem solvers in your course?
Can you do it in a semester?
A10: It depends on which students. If your goal is for all students in your courses to become expert problem
solvers, forget it—if you generally follow effective pedagogical practices, how students do in your
course will depend more on them than on you. Some of our students are smarter than we ever were: we
could give them the textbook, tell them what chapters to study, give them a complete list of our course
learning objectives, and tell them to come back at the end of the semester and take the final exam, and
they would pass with very high grades. Other students lack the knowledge and skills they need from
their previous education, or they don’t complete our assignments and don’t study for our exams. No
matter how well we teach, those students will probably do poorly in our courses.
Your goal should be to equip your students who (a) are capable of meeting your learning objectives, (b)
complete your assignments, and (c) study adequately for your tests, to do well in your courses. When
you teach a course for the first time, make careful notes about what goes well and what you need to
change next time you teach that course (it usually includes cutting down on “nice-to-know” as opposed
to “need-to-know” course content). Next time you teach the course, you’ll usually have it essentially
where you want it, including being able to cover it successfully in a semester.