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The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Psychology

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48 Problem Solving

Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara

  • Published: 03 June 2013
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Problem solving refers to cognitive processing directed at achieving a goal when the problem solver does not initially know a solution method. A problem exists when someone has a goal but does not know how to achieve it. Problems can be classified as routine or nonroutine, and as well defined or ill defined. The major cognitive processes in problem solving are representing, planning, executing, and monitoring. The major kinds of knowledge required for problem solving are facts, concepts, procedures, strategies, and beliefs. Classic theoretical approaches to the study of problem solving are associationism, Gestalt, and information processing. Current issues and suggested future issues include decision making, intelligence and creativity, teaching of thinking skills, expert problem solving, analogical reasoning, mathematical and scientific thinking, everyday thinking, and the cognitive neuroscience of problem solving. Common themes concern the domain specificity of problem solving and a focus on problem solving in authentic contexts.

The study of problem solving begins with defining problem solving, problem, and problem types. This introduction to problem solving is rounded out with an examination of cognitive processes in problem solving, the role of knowledge in problem solving, and historical approaches to the study of problem solving.

Definition of Problem Solving

Problem solving refers to cognitive processing directed at achieving a goal for which the problem solver does not initially know a solution method. This definition consists of four major elements (Mayer, 1992 ; Mayer & Wittrock, 2006 ):

Cognitive —Problem solving occurs within the problem solver’s cognitive system and can only be inferred indirectly from the problem solver’s behavior (including biological changes, introspections, and actions during problem solving). Process —Problem solving involves mental computations in which some operation is applied to a mental representation, sometimes resulting in the creation of a new mental representation. Directed —Problem solving is aimed at achieving a goal. Personal —Problem solving depends on the existing knowledge of the problem solver so that what is a problem for one problem solver may not be a problem for someone who already knows a solution method.

The definition is broad enough to include a wide array of cognitive activities such as deciding which apartment to rent, figuring out how to use a cell phone interface, playing a game of chess, making a medical diagnosis, finding the answer to an arithmetic word problem, or writing a chapter for a handbook. Problem solving is pervasive in human life and is crucial for human survival. Although this chapter focuses on problem solving in humans, problem solving also occurs in nonhuman animals and in intelligent machines.

How is problem solving related to other forms of high-level cognition processing, such as thinking and reasoning? Thinking refers to cognitive processing in individuals but includes both directed thinking (which corresponds to the definition of problem solving) and undirected thinking such as daydreaming (which does not correspond to the definition of problem solving). Thus, problem solving is a type of thinking (i.e., directed thinking).

Reasoning refers to problem solving within specific classes of problems, such as deductive reasoning or inductive reasoning. In deductive reasoning, the reasoner is given premises and must derive a conclusion by applying the rules of logic. For example, given that “A is greater than B” and “B is greater than C,” a reasoner can conclude that “A is greater than C.” In inductive reasoning, the reasoner is given (or has experienced) a collection of examples or instances and must infer a rule. For example, given that X, C, and V are in the “yes” group and x, c, and v are in the “no” group, the reasoning may conclude that B is in “yes” group because it is in uppercase format. Thus, reasoning is a type of problem solving.

Definition of Problem

A problem occurs when someone has a goal but does not know to achieve it. This definition is consistent with how the Gestalt psychologist Karl Duncker ( 1945 , p. 1) defined a problem in his classic monograph, On Problem Solving : “A problem arises when a living creature has a goal but does not know how this goal is to be reached.” However, today researchers recognize that the definition should be extended to include problem solving by intelligent machines. This definition can be clarified using an information processing approach by noting that a problem occurs when a situation is in the given state, the problem solver wants the situation to be in the goal state, and there is no obvious way to move from the given state to the goal state (Newell & Simon, 1972 ). Accordingly, the three main elements in describing a problem are the given state (i.e., the current state of the situation), the goal state (i.e., the desired state of the situation), and the set of allowable operators (i.e., the actions the problem solver is allowed to take). The definition of “problem” is broad enough to include the situation confronting a physician who wishes to make a diagnosis on the basis of preliminary tests and a patient examination, as well as a beginning physics student trying to solve a complex physics problem.

Types of Problems

It is customary in the problem-solving literature to make a distinction between routine and nonroutine problems. Routine problems are problems that are so familiar to the problem solver that the problem solver knows a solution method. For example, for most adults, “What is 365 divided by 12?” is a routine problem because they already know the procedure for long division. Nonroutine problems are so unfamiliar to the problem solver that the problem solver does not know a solution method. For example, figuring out the best way to set up a funding campaign for a nonprofit charity is a nonroutine problem for most volunteers. Technically, routine problems do not meet the definition of problem because the problem solver has a goal but knows how to achieve it. Much research on problem solving has focused on routine problems, although most interesting problems in life are nonroutine.

Another customary distinction is between well-defined and ill-defined problems. Well-defined problems have a clearly specified given state, goal state, and legal operators. Examples include arithmetic computation problems or games such as checkers or tic-tac-toe. Ill-defined problems have a poorly specified given state, goal state, or legal operators, or a combination of poorly defined features. Examples include solving the problem of global warming or finding a life partner. Although, ill-defined problems are more challenging, much research in problem solving has focused on well-defined problems.

Cognitive Processes in Problem Solving

The process of problem solving can be broken down into two main phases: problem representation , in which the problem solver builds a mental representation of the problem situation, and problem solution , in which the problem solver works to produce a solution. The major subprocess in problem representation is representing , which involves building a situation model —that is, a mental representation of the situation described in the problem. The major subprocesses in problem solution are planning , which involves devising a plan for how to solve the problem; executing , which involves carrying out the plan; and monitoring , which involves evaluating and adjusting one’s problem solving.

For example, given an arithmetic word problem such as “Alice has three marbles. Sarah has two more marbles than Alice. How many marbles does Sarah have?” the process of representing involves building a situation model in which Alice has a set of marbles, there is set of marbles for the difference between the two girls, and Sarah has a set of marbles that consists of Alice’s marbles and the difference set. In the planning process, the problem solver sets a goal of adding 3 and 2. In the executing process, the problem solver carries out the computation, yielding an answer of 5. In the monitoring process, the problem solver looks over what was done and concludes that 5 is a reasonable answer. In most complex problem-solving episodes, the four cognitive processes may not occur in linear order, but rather may interact with one another. Although some research focuses mainly on the execution process, problem solvers may tend to have more difficulty with the processes of representing, planning, and monitoring.

Knowledge for Problem Solving

An important theme in problem-solving research is that problem-solving proficiency on any task depends on the learner’s knowledge (Anderson et al., 2001 ; Mayer, 1992 ). Five kinds of knowledge are as follows:

Facts —factual knowledge about the characteristics of elements in the world, such as “Sacramento is the capital of California” Concepts —conceptual knowledge, including categories, schemas, or models, such as knowing the difference between plants and animals or knowing how a battery works Procedures —procedural knowledge of step-by-step processes, such as how to carry out long-division computations Strategies —strategic knowledge of general methods such as breaking a problem into parts or thinking of a related problem Beliefs —attitudinal knowledge about how one’s cognitive processing works such as thinking, “I’m good at this”

Although some research focuses mainly on the role of facts and procedures in problem solving, complex problem solving also depends on the problem solver’s concepts, strategies, and beliefs (Mayer, 1992 ).

Historical Approaches to Problem Solving

Psychological research on problem solving began in the early 1900s, as an outgrowth of mental philosophy (Humphrey, 1963 ; Mandler & Mandler, 1964 ). Throughout the 20th century four theoretical approaches developed: early conceptions, associationism, Gestalt psychology, and information processing.

Early Conceptions

The start of psychology as a science can be set at 1879—the year Wilhelm Wundt opened the first world’s psychology laboratory in Leipzig, Germany, and sought to train the world’s first cohort of experimental psychologists. Instead of relying solely on philosophical speculations about how the human mind works, Wundt sought to apply the methods of experimental science to issues addressed in mental philosophy. His theoretical approach became structuralism —the analysis of consciousness into its basic elements.

Wundt’s main contribution to the study of problem solving, however, was to call for its banishment. According to Wundt, complex cognitive processing was too complicated to be studied by experimental methods, so “nothing can be discovered in such experiments” (Wundt, 1911/1973 ). Despite his admonishments, however, a group of his former students began studying thinking mainly in Wurzburg, Germany. Using the method of introspection, subjects were asked to describe their thought process as they solved word association problems, such as finding the superordinate of “newspaper” (e.g., an answer is “publication”). Although the Wurzburg group—as they came to be called—did not produce a new theoretical approach, they found empirical evidence that challenged some of the key assumptions of mental philosophy. For example, Aristotle had proclaimed that all thinking involves mental imagery, but the Wurzburg group was able to find empirical evidence for imageless thought .

Associationism

The first major theoretical approach to take hold in the scientific study of problem solving was associationism —the idea that the cognitive representations in the mind consist of ideas and links between them and that cognitive processing in the mind involves following a chain of associations from one idea to the next (Mandler & Mandler, 1964 ; Mayer, 1992 ). For example, in a classic study, E. L. Thorndike ( 1911 ) placed a hungry cat in what he called a puzzle box—a wooden crate in which pulling a loop of string that hung from overhead would open a trap door to allow the cat to escape to a bowl of food outside the crate. Thorndike placed the cat in the puzzle box once a day for several weeks. On the first day, the cat engaged in many extraneous behaviors such as pouncing against the wall, pushing its paws through the slats, and meowing, but on successive days the number of extraneous behaviors tended to decrease. Overall, the time required to get out of the puzzle box decreased over the course of the experiment, indicating the cat was learning how to escape.

Thorndike’s explanation for how the cat learned to solve the puzzle box problem is based on an associationist view: The cat begins with a habit family hierarchy —a set of potential responses (e.g., pouncing, thrusting, meowing, etc.) all associated with the same stimulus (i.e., being hungry and confined) and ordered in terms of strength of association. When placed in the puzzle box, the cat executes its strongest response (e.g., perhaps pouncing against the wall), but when it fails, the strength of the association is weakened, and so on for each unsuccessful action. Eventually, the cat gets down to what was initially a weak response—waving its paw in the air—but when that response leads to accidentally pulling the string and getting out, it is strengthened. Over the course of many trials, the ineffective responses become weak and the successful response becomes strong. Thorndike refers to this process as the law of effect : Responses that lead to dissatisfaction become less associated with the situation and responses that lead to satisfaction become more associated with the situation. According to Thorndike’s associationist view, solving a problem is simply a matter of trial and error and accidental success. A major challenge to assocationist theory concerns the nature of transfer—that is, where does a problem solver find a creative solution that has never been performed before? Associationist conceptions of cognition can be seen in current research, including neural networks, connectionist models, and parallel distributed processing models (Rogers & McClelland, 2004 ).

Gestalt Psychology

The Gestalt approach to problem solving developed in the 1930s and 1940s as a counterbalance to the associationist approach. According to the Gestalt approach, cognitive representations consist of coherent structures (rather than individual associations) and the cognitive process of problem solving involves building a coherent structure (rather than strengthening and weakening of associations). For example, in a classic study, Kohler ( 1925 ) placed a hungry ape in a play yard that contained several empty shipping crates and a banana attached overhead but out of reach. Based on observing the ape in this situation, Kohler noted that the ape did not randomly try responses until one worked—as suggested by Thorndike’s associationist view. Instead, the ape stood under the banana, looked up at it, looked at the crates, and then in a flash of insight stacked the crates under the bananas as a ladder, and walked up the steps in order to reach the banana.

According to Kohler, the ape experienced a sudden visual reorganization in which the elements in the situation fit together in a way to solve the problem; that is, the crates could become a ladder that reduces the distance to the banana. Kohler referred to the underlying mechanism as insight —literally seeing into the structure of the situation. A major challenge of Gestalt theory is its lack of precision; for example, naming a process (i.e., insight) is not the same as explaining how it works. Gestalt conceptions can be seen in modern research on mental models and schemas (Gentner & Stevens, 1983 ).

Information Processing

The information processing approach to problem solving developed in the 1960s and 1970s and was based on the influence of the computer metaphor—the idea that humans are processors of information (Mayer, 2009 ). According to the information processing approach, problem solving involves a series of mental computations—each of which consists of applying a process to a mental representation (such as comparing two elements to determine whether they differ).

In their classic book, Human Problem Solving , Newell and Simon ( 1972 ) proposed that problem solving involved a problem space and search heuristics . A problem space is a mental representation of the initial state of the problem, the goal state of the problem, and all possible intervening states (based on applying allowable operators). Search heuristics are strategies for moving through the problem space from the given to the goal state. Newell and Simon focused on means-ends analysis , in which the problem solver continually sets goals and finds moves to accomplish goals.

Newell and Simon used computer simulation as a research method to test their conception of human problem solving. First, they asked human problem solvers to think aloud as they solved various problems such as logic problems, chess, and cryptarithmetic problems. Then, based on an information processing analysis, Newell and Simon created computer programs that solved these problems. In comparing the solution behavior of humans and computers, they found high similarity, suggesting that the computer programs were solving problems using the same thought processes as humans.

An important advantage of the information processing approach is that problem solving can be described with great clarity—as a computer program. An important limitation of the information processing approach is that it is most useful for describing problem solving for well-defined problems rather than ill-defined problems. The information processing conception of cognition lives on as a keystone of today’s cognitive science (Mayer, 2009 ).

Classic Issues in Problem Solving

Three classic issues in research on problem solving concern the nature of transfer (suggested by the associationist approach), the nature of insight (suggested by the Gestalt approach), and the role of problem-solving heuristics (suggested by the information processing approach).

Transfer refers to the effects of prior learning on new learning (or new problem solving). Positive transfer occurs when learning A helps someone learn B. Negative transfer occurs when learning A hinders someone from learning B. Neutral transfer occurs when learning A has no effect on learning B. Positive transfer is a central goal of education, but research shows that people often do not transfer what they learned to solving problems in new contexts (Mayer, 1992 ; Singley & Anderson, 1989 ).

Three conceptions of the mechanisms underlying transfer are specific transfer , general transfer , and specific transfer of general principles . Specific transfer refers to the idea that learning A will help someone learn B only if A and B have specific elements in common. For example, learning Spanish may help someone learn Latin because some of the vocabulary words are similar and the verb conjugation rules are similar. General transfer refers to the idea that learning A can help someone learn B even they have nothing specifically in common but A helps improve the learner’s mind in general. For example, learning Latin may help people learn “proper habits of mind” so they are better able to learn completely unrelated subjects as well. Specific transfer of general principles is the idea that learning A will help someone learn B if the same general principle or solution method is required for both even if the specific elements are different.

In a classic study, Thorndike and Woodworth ( 1901 ) found that students who learned Latin did not subsequently learn bookkeeping any better than students who had not learned Latin. They interpreted this finding as evidence for specific transfer—learning A did not transfer to learning B because A and B did not have specific elements in common. Modern research on problem-solving transfer continues to show that people often do not demonstrate general transfer (Mayer, 1992 ). However, it is possible to teach people a general strategy for solving a problem, so that when they see a new problem in a different context they are able to apply the strategy to the new problem (Judd, 1908 ; Mayer, 2008 )—so there is also research support for the idea of specific transfer of general principles.

Insight refers to a change in a problem solver’s mind from not knowing how to solve a problem to knowing how to solve it (Mayer, 1995 ; Metcalfe & Wiebe, 1987 ). In short, where does the idea for a creative solution come from? A central goal of problem-solving research is to determine the mechanisms underlying insight.

The search for insight has led to five major (but not mutually exclusive) explanatory mechanisms—insight as completing a schema, insight as suddenly reorganizing visual information, insight as reformulation of a problem, insight as removing mental blocks, and insight as finding a problem analog (Mayer, 1995 ). Completing a schema is exemplified in a study by Selz (Fridja & de Groot, 1982 ), in which people were asked to think aloud as they solved word association problems such as “What is the superordinate for newspaper?” To solve the problem, people sometimes thought of a coordinate, such as “magazine,” and then searched for a superordinate category that subsumed both terms, such as “publication.” According to Selz, finding a solution involved building a schema that consisted of a superordinate and two subordinate categories.

Reorganizing visual information is reflected in Kohler’s ( 1925 ) study described in a previous section in which a hungry ape figured out how to stack boxes as a ladder to reach a banana hanging above. According to Kohler, the ape looked around the yard and found the solution in a flash of insight by mentally seeing how the parts could be rearranged to accomplish the goal.

Reformulating a problem is reflected in a classic study by Duncker ( 1945 ) in which people are asked to think aloud as they solve the tumor problem—how can you destroy a tumor in a patient without destroying surrounding healthy tissue by using rays that at sufficient intensity will destroy any tissue in their path? In analyzing the thinking-aloud protocols—that is, transcripts of what the problem solvers said—Duncker concluded that people reformulated the goal in various ways (e.g., avoid contact with healthy tissue, immunize healthy tissue, have ray be weak in healthy tissue) until they hit upon a productive formulation that led to the solution (i.e., concentrating many weak rays on the tumor).

Removing mental blocks is reflected in classic studies by Duncker ( 1945 ) in which solving a problem involved thinking of a novel use for an object, and by Luchins ( 1942 ) in which solving a problem involved not using a procedure that had worked well on previous problems. Finding a problem analog is reflected in classic research by Wertheimer ( 1959 ) in which learning to find the area of a parallelogram is supported by the insight that one could cut off the triangle on one side and place it on the other side to form a rectangle—so a parallelogram is really a rectangle in disguise. The search for insight along each of these five lines continues in current problem-solving research.

Heuristics are problem-solving strategies, that is, general approaches to how to solve problems. Newell and Simon ( 1972 ) suggested three general problem-solving heuristics for moving from a given state to a goal state: random trial and error , hill climbing , and means-ends analysis . Random trial and error involves randomly selecting a legal move and applying it to create a new problem state, and repeating that process until the goal state is reached. Random trial and error may work for simple problems but is not efficient for complex ones. Hill climbing involves selecting the legal move that moves the problem solver closer to the goal state. Hill climbing will not work for problems in which the problem solver must take a move that temporarily moves away from the goal as is required in many problems.

Means-ends analysis involves creating goals and seeking moves that can accomplish the goal. If a goal cannot be directly accomplished, a subgoal is created to remove one or more obstacles. Newell and Simon ( 1972 ) successfully used means-ends analysis as the search heuristic in a computer program aimed at general problem solving, that is, solving a diverse collection of problems. However, people may also use specific heuristics that are designed to work for specific problem-solving situations (Gigerenzer, Todd, & ABC Research Group, 1999 ; Kahneman & Tversky, 1984 ).

Current and Future Issues in Problem Solving

Eight current issues in problem solving involve decision making, intelligence and creativity, teaching of thinking skills, expert problem solving, analogical reasoning, mathematical and scientific problem solving, everyday thinking, and the cognitive neuroscience of problem solving.

Decision Making

Decision making refers to the cognitive processing involved in choosing between two or more alternatives (Baron, 2000 ; Markman & Medin, 2002 ). For example, a decision-making task may involve choosing between getting $240 for sure or having a 25% change of getting $1000. According to economic theories such as expected value theory, people should chose the second option, which is worth $250 (i.e., .25 x $1000) rather than the first option, which is worth $240 (1.00 x $240), but psychological research shows that most people prefer the first option (Kahneman & Tversky, 1984 ).

Research on decision making has generated three classes of theories (Markman & Medin, 2002 ): descriptive theories, such as prospect theory (Kahneman & Tversky), which are based on the ideas that people prefer to overweight the cost of a loss and tend to overestimate small probabilities; heuristic theories, which are based on the idea that people use a collection of short-cut strategies such as the availability heuristic (Gigerenzer et al., 1999 ; Kahneman & Tversky, 2000 ); and constructive theories, such as mental accounting (Kahneman & Tversky, 2000 ), in which people build a narrative to justify their choices to themselves. Future research is needed to examine decision making in more realistic settings.

Intelligence and Creativity

Although researchers do not have complete consensus on the definition of intelligence (Sternberg, 1990 ), it is reasonable to view intelligence as the ability to learn or adapt to new situations. Fluid intelligence refers to the potential to solve problems without any relevant knowledge, whereas crystallized intelligence refers to the potential to solve problems based on relevant prior knowledge (Sternberg & Gregorenko, 2003 ). As people gain more experience in a field, their problem-solving performance depends more on crystallized intelligence (i.e., domain knowledge) than on fluid intelligence (i.e., general ability) (Sternberg & Gregorenko, 2003 ). The ability to monitor and manage one’s cognitive processing during problem solving—which can be called metacognition —is an important aspect of intelligence (Sternberg, 1990 ). Research is needed to pinpoint the knowledge that is needed to support intelligent performance on problem-solving tasks.

Creativity refers to the ability to generate ideas that are original (i.e., other people do not think of the same idea) and functional (i.e., the idea works; Sternberg, 1999 ). Creativity is often measured using tests of divergent thinking —that is, generating as many solutions as possible for a problem (Guilford, 1967 ). For example, the uses test asks people to list as many uses as they can think of for a brick. Creativity is different from intelligence, and it is at the heart of creative problem solving—generating a novel solution to a problem that the problem solver has never seen before. An important research question concerns whether creative problem solving depends on specific knowledge or creativity ability in general.

Teaching of Thinking Skills

How can people learn to be better problem solvers? Mayer ( 2008 ) proposes four questions concerning teaching of thinking skills:

What to teach —Successful programs attempt to teach small component skills (such as how to generate and evaluate hypotheses) rather than improve the mind as a single monolithic skill (Covington, Crutchfield, Davies, & Olton, 1974 ). How to teach —Successful programs focus on modeling the process of problem solving rather than solely reinforcing the product of problem solving (Bloom & Broder, 1950 ). Where to teach —Successful programs teach problem-solving skills within the specific context they will be used rather than within a general course on how to solve problems (Nickerson, 1999 ). When to teach —Successful programs teaching higher order skills early rather than waiting until lower order skills are completely mastered (Tharp & Gallimore, 1988 ).

Overall, research on teaching of thinking skills points to the domain specificity of problem solving; that is, successful problem solving depends on the problem solver having domain knowledge that is relevant to the problem-solving task.

Expert Problem Solving

Research on expertise is concerned with differences between how experts and novices solve problems (Ericsson, Feltovich, & Hoffman, 2006 ). Expertise can be defined in terms of time (e.g., 10 years of concentrated experience in a field), performance (e.g., earning a perfect score on an assessment), or recognition (e.g., receiving a Nobel Prize or becoming Grand Master in chess). For example, in classic research conducted in the 1940s, de Groot ( 1965 ) found that chess experts did not have better general memory than chess novices, but they did have better domain-specific memory for the arrangement of chess pieces on the board. Chase and Simon ( 1973 ) replicated this result in a better controlled experiment. An explanation is that experts have developed schemas that allow them to chunk collections of pieces into a single configuration.

In another landmark study, Larkin et al. ( 1980 ) compared how experts (e.g., physics professors) and novices (e.g., first-year physics students) solved textbook physics problems about motion. Experts tended to work forward from the given information to the goal, whereas novices tended to work backward from the goal to the givens using a means-ends analysis strategy. Experts tended to store their knowledge in an integrated way, whereas novices tended to store their knowledge in isolated fragments. In another study, Chi, Feltovich, and Glaser ( 1981 ) found that experts tended to focus on the underlying physics concepts (such as conservation of energy), whereas novices tended to focus on the surface features of the problem (such as inclined planes or springs). Overall, research on expertise is useful in pinpointing what experts know that is different from what novices know. An important theme is that experts rely on domain-specific knowledge rather than solely general cognitive ability.

Analogical Reasoning

Analogical reasoning occurs when people solve one problem by using their knowledge about another problem (Holyoak, 2005 ). For example, suppose a problem solver learns how to solve a problem in one context using one solution method and then is given a problem in another context that requires the same solution method. In this case, the problem solver must recognize that the new problem has structural similarity to the old problem (i.e., it may be solved by the same method), even though they do not have surface similarity (i.e., the cover stories are different). Three steps in analogical reasoning are recognizing —seeing that a new problem is similar to a previously solved problem; abstracting —finding the general method used to solve the old problem; and mapping —using that general method to solve the new problem.

Research on analogical reasoning shows that people often do not recognize that a new problem can be solved by the same method as a previously solved problem (Holyoak, 2005 ). However, research also shows that successful analogical transfer to a new problem is more likely when the problem solver has experience with two old problems that have the same underlying structural features (i.e., they are solved by the same principle) but different surface features (i.e., they have different cover stories) (Holyoak, 2005 ). This finding is consistent with the idea of specific transfer of general principles as described in the section on “Transfer.”

Mathematical and Scientific Problem Solving

Research on mathematical problem solving suggests that five kinds of knowledge are needed to solve arithmetic word problems (Mayer, 2008 ):

Factual knowledge —knowledge about the characteristics of problem elements, such as knowing that there are 100 cents in a dollar Schematic knowledge —knowledge of problem types, such as being able to recognize time-rate-distance problems Strategic knowledge —knowledge of general methods, such as how to break a problem into parts Procedural knowledge —knowledge of processes, such as how to carry our arithmetic operations Attitudinal knowledge —beliefs about one’s mathematical problem-solving ability, such as thinking, “I am good at this”

People generally possess adequate procedural knowledge but may have difficulty in solving mathematics problems because they lack factual, schematic, strategic, or attitudinal knowledge (Mayer, 2008 ). Research is needed to pinpoint the role of domain knowledge in mathematical problem solving.

Research on scientific problem solving shows that people harbor misconceptions, such as believing that a force is needed to keep an object in motion (McCloskey, 1983 ). Learning to solve science problems involves conceptual change, in which the problem solver comes to recognize that previous conceptions are wrong (Mayer, 2008 ). Students can be taught to engage in scientific reasoning such as hypothesis testing through direct instruction in how to control for variables (Chen & Klahr, 1999 ). A central theme of research on scientific problem solving concerns the role of domain knowledge.

Everyday Thinking

Everyday thinking refers to problem solving in the context of one’s life outside of school. For example, children who are street vendors tend to use different procedures for solving arithmetic problems when they are working on the streets than when they are in school (Nunes, Schlieman, & Carraher, 1993 ). This line of research highlights the role of situated cognition —the idea that thinking always is shaped by the physical and social context in which it occurs (Robbins & Aydede, 2009 ). Research is needed to determine how people solve problems in authentic contexts.

Cognitive Neuroscience of Problem Solving

The cognitive neuroscience of problem solving is concerned with the brain activity that occurs during problem solving. For example, using fMRI brain imaging methodology, Goel ( 2005 ) found that people used the language areas of the brain to solve logical reasoning problems presented in sentences (e.g., “All dogs are pets…”) and used the spatial areas of the brain to solve logical reasoning problems presented in abstract letters (e.g., “All D are P…”). Cognitive neuroscience holds the potential to make unique contributions to the study of problem solving.

Problem solving has always been a topic at the fringe of cognitive psychology—too complicated to study intensively but too important to completely ignore. Problem solving—especially in realistic environments—is messy in comparison to studying elementary processes in cognition. The field remains fragmented in the sense that topics such as decision making, reasoning, intelligence, expertise, mathematical problem solving, everyday thinking, and the like are considered to be separate topics, each with its own separate literature. Yet some recurring themes are the role of domain-specific knowledge in problem solving and the advantages of studying problem solving in authentic contexts.

Future Directions

Some important issues for future research include the three classic issues examined in this chapter—the nature of problem-solving transfer (i.e., How are people able to use what they know about previous problem solving to help them in new problem solving?), the nature of insight (e.g., What is the mechanism by which a creative solution is constructed?), and heuristics (e.g., What are some teachable strategies for problem solving?). In addition, future research in problem solving should continue to pinpoint the role of domain-specific knowledge in problem solving, the nature of cognitive ability in problem solving, how to help people develop proficiency in solving problems, and how to provide aids for problem solving.

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Further Reading

Baron, J. ( 2008 ). Thinking and deciding (4th ed). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Duncker, K. ( 1945 ). On problem solving. Psychological Monographs , 58(3) (Whole No. 270).

Holyoak, K. J. , & Morrison, R. G. ( 2005 ). The Cambridge handbook of thinking and reasoning . New York: Cambridge University Press.

Mayer, R. E. , & Wittrock, M. C. ( 2006 ). Problem solving. In P. A. Alexander & P. H. Winne (Eds.), Handbook of educational psychology (2nd ed., pp. 287–304). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Sternberg, R. J. , & Ben-Zeev, T. ( 2001 ). Complex cognition: The psychology of human thought . New York: Oxford University Press.

Weisberg, R. W. ( 2006 ). Creativity . New York: Wiley.

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problem-solving

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  • v.8(3); Fall 2009

Teaching Creativity and Inventive Problem Solving in Science

Robert l. dehaan.

Division of Educational Studies, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322

Engaging learners in the excitement of science, helping them discover the value of evidence-based reasoning and higher-order cognitive skills, and teaching them to become creative problem solvers have long been goals of science education reformers. But the means to achieve these goals, especially methods to promote creative thinking in scientific problem solving, have not become widely known or used. In this essay, I review the evidence that creativity is not a single hard-to-measure property. The creative process can be explained by reference to increasingly well-understood cognitive skills such as cognitive flexibility and inhibitory control that are widely distributed in the population. I explore the relationship between creativity and the higher-order cognitive skills, review assessment methods, and describe several instructional strategies for enhancing creative problem solving in the college classroom. Evidence suggests that instruction to support the development of creativity requires inquiry-based teaching that includes explicit strategies to promote cognitive flexibility. Students need to be repeatedly reminded and shown how to be creative, to integrate material across subject areas, to question their own assumptions, and to imagine other viewpoints and possibilities. Further research is required to determine whether college students' learning will be enhanced by these measures.

INTRODUCTION

Dr. Dunne paces in front of his section of first-year college students, today not as their Bio 110 teacher but in the role of facilitator in their monthly “invention session.” For this meeting, the topic is stem cell therapy in heart disease. Members of each team of four students have primed themselves on the topic by reading selected articles from accessible sources such as Science, Nature, and Scientific American, and searching the World Wide Web, triangulating for up-to-date, accurate, background information. Each team knows that their first goal is to define a set of problems or limitations to overcome within the topic and to begin to think of possible solutions. Dr. Dunne starts the conversation by reminding the group of the few ground rules: one speaker at a time, listen carefully and have respect for others' ideas, question your own and others' assumptions, focus on alternative paths or solutions, maintain an atmosphere of collaboration and mutual support. He then sparks the discussion by asking one of the teams to describe a problem in need of solution.

Science in the United States is widely credited as a major source of discovery and economic development. According to the 2005 TAP Report produced by a prominent group of corporate leaders, “To maintain our country's competitiveness in the twenty-first century, we must cultivate the skilled scientists and engineers needed to create tomorrow's innovations.” ( www.tap2015.org/about/TAP_report2.pdf ). A panel of scientists, engineers, educators, and policy makers convened by the National Research Council (NRC) concurred with this view, reporting that the vitality of the nation “is derived in large part from the productivity of well-trained people and the steady stream of scientific and technical innovations they produce” ( NRC, 2007 ).

For many decades, science education reformers have promoted the idea that learners should be engaged in the excitement of science; they should be helped to discover the value of evidence-based reasoning and higher-order cognitive skills, and be taught to become innovative problem solvers (for reviews, see DeHaan, 2005 ; Hake, 2005 ; Nelson, 2008 ; Perkins and Wieman, 2008 ). But the means to achieve these goals, especially methods to promote creative thinking in scientific problem solving, are not widely known or used. An invention session such as that led by the fictional Dr. Dunne, described above, may seem fanciful as a means of teaching students to think about science as something more than a body of facts and terms to memorize. In recent years, however, models for promoting creative problem solving were developed for classroom use, as detailed by Treffinger and Isaksen (2005) , and such techniques are often used in the real world of high technology. To promote imaginative thinking, the advertising executive Alex F. Osborn invented brainstorming ( Osborn, 1948 , 1979 ), a technique that has since been successful in stimulating inventiveness among engineers and scientists. Could such strategies be transferred to a class for college students? Could they serve as a supplement to a high-quality, scientific teaching curriculum that helps students learn the facts and conceptual frameworks of science and make progress along the novice–expert continuum? Could brainstorming or other instructional strategies that are specifically designed to promote creativity teach students to be more adaptive in their growing expertise, more innovative in their problem-solving abilities? To begin to answer those questions, we first need to understand what is meant by “creativity.”

What Is Creativity? Big-C versus Mini-C Creativity

How to define creativity is an age-old question. Justice Potter Stewart's famous dictum regarding obscenity “I know it when I see it” has also long been an accepted test of creativity. But this is not an adequate criterion for developing an instructional approach. A scientist colleague of mine recently noted that “Many of us [in the scientific community] rarely give the creative process a second thought, imagining one either ‘has it’ or doesn't.” We often think of inventiveness or creativity in scientific fields as the kind of gift associated with a Michelangelo or Einstein. This is what Kaufman and Beghetto (2008) call big-C creativity, borrowing the term that earlier workers applied to the talents of experts in various fields who were identified as particularly creative by their expert colleagues ( MacKinnon, 1978 ). In this sense, creativity is seen as the ability of individuals to generate new ideas that contribute substantially to an intellectual domain. Howard Gardner defined such a creative person as one who “regularly solves problems, fashions products, or defines new questions in a domain in a way that is initially considered novel but that ultimately comes to be accepted in a particular cultural setting” ( Gardner, 1993 , p. 35).

But there is another level of inventiveness termed by various authors as “little-c” ( Craft, 2000 ) or “mini-c” ( Kaufman and Beghetto, 2008 ) creativity that is widespread among all populations. This would be consistent with the workplace definition of creativity offered by Amabile and her coworkers: “coming up with fresh ideas for changing products, services and processes so as to better achieve the organization's goals” ( Amabile et al. , 2005 ). Mini-c creativity is based on what Craft calls “possibility thinking” ( Craft, 2000 , pp. 3–4), as experienced when a worker suddenly has the insight to visualize a new, improved way to accomplish a task; it is represented by the “aha” moment when a student first sees two previously disparate concepts or facts in a new relationship, an example of what Arthur Koestler identified as bisociation: “perceiving a situation or event in two habitually incompatible associative contexts” ( Koestler, 1964 , p. 95).

In this essay, I maintain that mini-c creativity is not a mysterious, innate endowment of rare individuals. Instead, I argue that creative thinking is a multicomponent process, mediated through social interactions, that can be explained by reference to increasingly well-understood mental abilities such as cognitive flexibility and cognitive control that are widely distributed in the population. Moreover, I explore some of the recent research evidence (though with no effort at a comprehensive literature review) showing that these mental abilities are teachable; like other higher-order cognitive skills (HOCS), they can be enhanced by explicit instruction.

Creativity Is a Multicomponent Process

Efforts to define creativity in psychological terms go back to J. P. Guilford ( Guilford, 1950 ) and E. P. Torrance ( Torrance, 1974 ), both of whom recognized that underlying the construct were other cognitive variables such as ideational fluency, originality of ideas, and sensitivity to missing elements. Many authors since then have extended the argument that a creative act is not a singular event but a process, an interplay among several interactive cognitive and affective elements. In this view, the creative act has two phases, a generative and an exploratory or evaluative phase ( Finke et al. , 1996 ). During the generative process, the creative mind pictures a set of novel mental models as potential solutions to a problem. In the exploratory phase, we evaluate the multiple options and select the best one. Early scholars of creativity, such as J. P. Guilford, characterized the two phases as divergent thinking and convergent thinking ( Guilford, 1950 ). Guilford defined divergent thinking as the ability to produce a broad range of associations to a given stimulus or to arrive at many solutions to a problem (for overviews of the field from different perspectives, see Amabile, 1996 ; Banaji et al. , 2006 ; Sawyer, 2006 ). In neurocognitive terms, divergent thinking is referred to as associative richness ( Gabora, 2002 ; Simonton, 2004 ), which is often measured experimentally by comparing the number of words that an individual generates from memory in response to stimulus words on a word association test. In contrast, convergent thinking refers to the capacity to quickly focus on the one best solution to a problem.

The idea that there are two stages to the creative process is consistent with results from cognition research indicating that there are two distinct modes of thought, associative and analytical ( Neisser, 1963 ; Sloman, 1996 ). In the associative mode, thinking is defocused, suggestive, and intuitive, revealing remote or subtle connections between items that may be correlated, or may not, and are usually not causally related ( Burton, 2008 ). In the analytical mode, thought is focused and evaluative, more conducive to analyzing relationships of cause and effect (for a review of other cognitive aspects of creativity, see Runco, 2004 ). Science educators associate the analytical mode with the upper levels (analysis, synthesis, and evaluation) of Bloom's taxonomy (e.g., Crowe et al. , 2008 ), or with “critical thinking,” the process that underlies the “purposeful, self-regulatory judgment that drives problem-solving and decision-making” ( Quitadamo et al. , 2008 , p. 328). These modes of thinking are under cognitive control through the executive functions of the brain. The core executive functions, which are thought to underlie all planning, problem solving, and reasoning, are defined ( Blair and Razza, 2007 ) as working memory control (mentally holding and retrieving information), cognitive flexibility (considering multiple ideas and seeing different perspectives), and inhibitory control (resisting several thoughts or actions to focus on one). Readers wishing to delve further into the neuroscience of the creative process can refer to the cerebrocerebellar theory of creativity ( Vandervert et al. , 2007 ) in which these mental activities are described neurophysiologically as arising through interactions among different parts of the brain.

The main point from all of these works is that creativity is not some single hard-to-measure property or act. There is ample evidence that the creative process requires both divergent and convergent thinking and that it can be explained by reference to increasingly well-understood underlying mental abilities ( Haring-Smith, 2006 ; Kim, 2006 ; Sawyer, 2006 ; Kaufman and Sternberg, 2007 ) and cognitive processes ( Simonton, 2004 ; Diamond et al. , 2007 ; Vandervert et al. , 2007 ).

Creativity Is Widely Distributed and Occurs in a Social Context

Although it is understandable to speak of an aha moment as a creative act by the person who experiences it, authorities in the field have long recognized (e.g., Simonton, 1975 ) that creative thinking is not so much an individual trait but rather a social phenomenon involving interactions among people within their specific group or cultural settings. “Creativity isn't just a property of individuals, it is also a property of social groups” ( Sawyer, 2006 , p. 305). Indeed, Osborn introduced his brainstorming method because he was convinced that group creativity is always superior to individual creativity. He drew evidence for this conclusion from activities that demand collaborative output, for example, the improvisations of a jazz ensemble. Although each musician is individually creative during a performance, the novelty and inventiveness of each performer's playing is clearly influenced, and often enhanced, by “social and interactional processes” among the musicians ( Sawyer, 2006 , p. 120). Recently, Brophy (2006) offered evidence that for problem solving, the situation may be more nuanced. He confirmed that groups of interacting individuals were better at solving complex, multipart problems than single individuals. However, when dealing with certain kinds of single-issue problems, individual problem solvers produced a greater number of solutions than interacting groups, and those solutions were judged to be more original and useful.

Consistent with the findings of Brophy (2006) , many scholars acknowledge that creative discoveries in the real world such as solving the problems of cutting-edge science—which are usually complex and multipart—are influenced or even stimulated by social interaction among experts. The common image of the lone scientist in the laboratory experiencing a flash of creative inspiration is probably a myth from earlier days. As a case in point, the science historian Mara Beller analyzed the social processes that underlay some of the major discoveries of early twentieth-century quantum physics. Close examination of successive drafts of publications by members of the Copenhagen group revealed a remarkable degree of influence and collaboration among 10 or more colleagues, although many of these papers were published under the name of a single author ( Beller, 1999 ). Sociologists Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar's study ( Latour and Woolgar, 1986 ) of a neuroendocrinology laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies make the related point that social interactions among the participating scientists determined to a remarkable degree what discoveries were made and how they were interpreted. In the laboratory, researchers studied the chemical structure of substances released by the brain. By analysis of the Salk scientists' verbalizations of concepts, theories, formulas, and results of their investigations, Latour and Woolgar showed that the structures and interpretations that were agreed upon, that is, the discoveries announced by the laboratory, were mediated by social interactions and power relationships among members of the laboratory group. By studying the discovery process in other fields of the natural sciences, sociologists and anthropologists have provided more cases that further illustrate how social and cultural dimensions affect scientific insights (for a thoughtful review, see Knorr Cetina, 1995 ).

In sum, when an individual experiences an aha moment that feels like a singular creative act, it may rather have resulted from a multicomponent process, under the influence of group interactions and social context. The process that led up to what may be sensed as a sudden insight will probably have included at least three diverse, but testable elements: 1) divergent thinking, including ideational fluency or cognitive flexibility, which is the cognitive executive function that underlies the ability to visualize and accept many ideas related to a problem; 2) convergent thinking or the application of inhibitory control to focus and mentally evaluate ideas; and 3) analogical thinking, the ability to understand a novel idea in terms of one that is already familiar.

LITERATURE REVIEW

What do we know about how to teach creativity.

The possibility of teaching for creative problem solving gained credence in the 1960s with the studies of Jerome Bruner, who argued that children should be encouraged to “treat a task as a problem for which one invents an answer, rather than finding one out there in a book or on the blackboard” ( Bruner, 1965 , pp. 1013–1014). Since that time, educators and psychologists have devised programs of instruction designed to promote creativity and inventiveness in virtually every student population: pre–K, elementary, high school, and college, as well as in disadvantaged students, athletes, and students in a variety of specific disciplines (for review, see Scott et al. , 2004 ). Smith (1998) identified 172 instructional approaches that have been applied at one time or another to develop divergent thinking skills.

Some of the most convincing evidence that elements of creativity can be enhanced by instruction comes from work with young children. Bodrova and Leong (2001) developed the Tools of the Mind (Tools) curriculum to improve all of the three core mental executive functions involved in creative problem solving: cognitive flexibility, working memory, and inhibitory control. In a year-long randomized study of 5-yr-olds from low-income families in 21 preschool classrooms, half of the teachers applied the districts' balanced literacy curriculum (literacy), whereas the experimenters trained the other half to teach the same academic content by using the Tools curriculum ( Diamond et al. , 2007 ). At the end of the year, when the children were tested with a battery of neurocognitive tests including a test for cognitive flexibility ( Durston et al. , 2003 ; Davidson et al. , 2006 ), those exposed to the Tools curriculum outperformed the literacy children by as much as 25% ( Diamond et al. , 2007 ). Although the Tools curriculum and literacy program were similar in academic content and in many other ways, they differed primarily in that Tools teachers spent 80% of their time explicitly reminding the children to think of alternative ways to solve a problem and building their executive function skills.

Teaching older students to be innovative also demands instruction that explicitly promotes creativity but is rigorously content-rich as well. A large body of research on the differences between novice and expert cognition indicates that creative thinking requires at least a minimal level of expertise and fluency within a knowledge domain ( Bransford et al. , 2000 ; Crawford and Brophy, 2006 ). What distinguishes experts from novices, in addition to their deeper knowledge of the subject, is their recognition of patterns in information, their ability to see relationships among disparate facts and concepts, and their capacity for organizing content into conceptual frameworks or schemata ( Bransford et al. , 2000 ; Sawyer, 2005 ).

Such expertise is often lacking in the traditional classroom. For students attempting to grapple with new subject matter, many kinds of problems that are presented in high school or college courses or that arise in the real world can be solved merely by applying newly learned algorithms or procedural knowledge. With practice, problem solving of this kind can become routine and is often considered to represent mastery of a subject, producing what Sternberg refers to as “pseudoexperts” ( Sternberg, 2003 ). But beyond such routine use of content knowledge the instructor's goal must be to produce students who have gained the HOCS needed to apply, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate knowledge ( Crowe et al. , 2008 ). The aim is to produce students who know enough about a field to grasp meaningful patterns of information, who can readily retrieve relevant knowledge from memory, and who can apply such knowledge effectively to novel problems. This condition is referred to as adaptive expertise ( Hatano and Ouro, 2003 ; Schwartz et al. , 2005 ). Instead of applying already mastered procedures, adaptive experts are able to draw on their knowledge to invent or adapt strategies for solving unique or novel problems within a knowledge domain. They are also able, ideally, to transfer conceptual frameworks and schemata from one domain to another (e.g., Schwartz et al. , 2005 ). Such flexible, innovative application of knowledge is what results in inventive or creative solutions to problems ( Crawford and Brophy, 2006 ; Crawford, 2007 ).

Promoting Creative Problem Solving in the College Classroom

In most college courses, instructors teach science primarily through lectures and textbooks that are dominated by facts and algorithmic processing rather than by concepts, principles, and evidence-based ways of thinking. This is despite ample evidence that many students gain little new knowledge from traditional lectures ( Hrepic et al. , 2007 ). Moreover, it is well documented that these methods engender passive learning rather than active engagement, boredom instead of intellectual excitement, and linear thinking rather than cognitive flexibility (e.g., Halpern and Hakel, 2003 ; Nelson, 2008 ; Perkins and Wieman, 2008 ). Cognitive flexibility, as noted, is one of the three core mental executive functions involved in creative problem solving ( Ausubel, 1963 , 2000 ). The capacity to apply ideas creatively in new contexts, referred to as the ability to “transfer” knowledge (see Mestre, 2005 ), requires that learners have opportunities to actively develop their own representations of information to convert it to a usable form. Especially when a knowledge domain is complex and fraught with ill-structured information, as in a typical introductory college biology course, instruction that emphasizes active-learning strategies is demonstrably more effective than traditional linear teaching in reducing failure rates and in promoting learning and transfer (e.g., Freeman et al. , 2007 ). Furthermore, there is already some evidence that inclusion of creativity training as part of a college curriculum can have positive effects. Hunsaker (2005) has reviewed a number of such studies. He cites work by McGregor (2001) , for example, showing that various creativity training programs including brainstorming and creative problem solving increase student scores on tests of creative-thinking abilities.

What explicit instructional strategies are available to promote creative problem solving? In addition to brainstorming, McFadzean (2002) discusses several “paradigm-stretching” techniques that can encourage creative ideas. One method, known as heuristic ideation, encourages participants to force together two unrelated concepts to discover novel relationships, a modern version of Koestler's bisociation ( Koestler, 1964 ). On the website of the Center for Development and Learning, Robert Sternberg and Wendy M. Williams offer 24 “tips” for teachers wishing to promote creativity in their students ( Sternberg and Williams, 1998 ). Among them, the following techniques might apply to a science classroom:

  • Model creativity—students develop creativity when instructors model creative thinking and inventiveness.
  • Repeatedly encourage idea generation—students need to be reminded to generate their own ideas and solutions in an environment free of criticism.
  • Cross-fertilize ideas—where possible, avoid teaching in subject-area boxes: a math box, a social studies box, etc; students' creative ideas and insights often result from learning to integrate material across subject areas.
  • Build self-efficacy—all students have the capacity to create and to experience the joy of having new ideas, but they must be helped to believe in their own capacity to be creative.
  • Constantly question assumptions—make questioning a part of the daily classroom exchange; it is more important for students to learn what questions to ask and how to ask them than to learn the answers.
  • Imagine other viewpoints—students broaden their perspectives by learning to reflect upon ideas and concepts from different points of view.

Although these strategies are all consistent with the knowledge about creativity that I have reviewed above, evidence from well-designed investigations to warrant the claim that they can enhance measurable indicators of creativity in college students is only recently beginning to materialize. If creativity most often occurs in “a mental state where attention is defocused, thought is associative, and a large number of mental representations are simultaneously activated” ( Martindale, 1999 , p. 149), the question arises whether instructional strategies designed to enhance the HOCS also foster such a mental state? Do valid tests exist to show that creative problem solving can be enhanced by such instruction?

How Is Creativity Related to Critical Thinking and the Higher-Order Cognitive Skills?

It is not uncommon to associate creativity and ingenuity with scientific reasoning ( Sawyer, 2005 ; 2006 ). When instructors apply scientific teaching strategies ( Handelsman et al. , 2004 ; DeHaan, 2005 ; Wood, 2009 ) by using instructional methods based on learning research, according to Ebert-May and Hodder ( 2008 ), “we see students actively engaged in the thinking, creativity, rigor, and experimentation we associate with the practice of science—in much the same way we see students learn in the field and in laboratories” (p. 2). Perkins and Wieman (2008) note that “To be successful innovators in science and engineering, students must develop a deep conceptual understanding of the underlying science ideas, an ability to apply these ideas and concepts broadly in different contexts, and a vision to see their relevance and usefulness in real-world applications … An innovator is able to perceive and realize potential connections and opportunities better than others” (pp. 181–182). The results of Scott et al. (2004) suggest that nontraditional courses in science that are based on constructivist principles and that use strategies of scientific teaching to promote the HOCS and enhance content mastery and dexterity in scientific thinking ( Handelsman et al. , 2007 ; Nelson, 2008 ) also should be effective in promoting creativity and cognitive flexibility if students are explicitly guided to learn these skills.

Creativity is an essential element of problem solving ( Mumford et al. , 1991 ; Runco, 2004 ) and of critical thinking ( Abrami et al. , 2008 ). As such, it is common to think of applications of creativity such as inventiveness and ingenuity among the HOCS as defined in Bloom's taxonomy ( Crowe et al. , 2008 ). Thus, it should come as no surprise that creativity, like other elements of the HOCS, can be taught most effectively through inquiry-based instruction, informed by constructivist theory ( Ausubel, 1963 , 2000 ; Duch et al. , 2001 ; Nelson, 2008 ). In a survey of 103 instructors who taught college courses that included creativity instruction, Bull et al. (1995) asked respondents to rate the importance of various course characteristics for enhancing student creativity. Items ranking high on the list were: providing a social climate in which students feels safe, an open classroom environment that promotes tolerance for ambiguity and independence, the use of humor, metaphorical thinking, and problem defining. Many of the responses emphasized the same strategies as those advanced to promote creative problem solving (e.g., Mumford et al. , 1991 ; McFadzean, 2002 ; Treffinger and Isaksen, 2005 ) and critical thinking ( Abrami et al. , 2008 ).

In a careful meta-analysis, Scott et al. (2004) examined 70 instructional interventions designed to enhance and measure creative performance. The results were striking. Courses that stressed techniques such as critical thinking, convergent thinking, and constraint identification produced the largest positive effect sizes. More open techniques that provided less guidance in strategic approaches had less impact on the instructional outcomes. A striking finding was the effectiveness of being explicit; approaches that clearly informed students about the nature of creativity and offered clear strategies for creative thinking were most effective. Approaches such as social modeling, cooperative learning, and case-based (project-based) techniques that required the application of newly acquired knowledge were found to be positively correlated to high effect sizes. The most clear-cut result to emerge from the Scott et al. (2004) study was simply to confirm that creativity instruction can be highly successful in enhancing divergent thinking, problem solving, and imaginative performance. Most importantly, of the various cognitive processes examined, those linked to the generation of new ideas such as problem finding, conceptual combination, and idea generation showed the greatest improvement. The success of creativity instruction, the authors concluded, can be attributed to “developing and providing guidance concerning the application of requisite cognitive capacities … [and] a set of heuristics or strategies for working with already available knowledge” (p. 382).

Many of the scientific teaching practices that have been shown by research to foster content mastery and HOCS, and that are coming more widely into use, also would be consistent with promoting creativity. Wood (2009) has recently reviewed examples of such practices and how to apply them. These include relatively small modifications of the traditional lecture to engender more active learning, such as the use of concept tests and peer instruction ( Mazur, 1996 ), Just-in-Time-Teaching techniques ( Novak et al. , 1999 ), and student response systems known as “clickers” ( Knight and Wood, 2005 ; Crossgrove and Curran, 2008 ), all designed to allow the instructor to frequently and effortlessly elicit and respond to student thinking. Other strategies can transform the lecture hall into a workshop or studio classroom ( Gaffney et al. , 2008 ) where the teaching curriculum may emphasize problem-based (also known as project-based or case-based) learning strategies ( Duch et al. , 2001 ; Ebert-May and Hodder, 2008 ) or “community-based inquiry” in which students engage in research that enhances their critical-thinking skills ( Quitadamo et al. , 2008 ).

Another important approach that could readily subserve explicit creativity instruction is the use of computer-based interactive simulations, or “sims” ( Perkins and Wieman, 2008 ) to facilitate inquiry learning and effective, easy self-assessment. An example in the biological sciences would be Neurons in Action ( http://neuronsinaction.com/home/main ). In such educational environments, students gain conceptual understanding of scientific ideas through interactive engagement with materials (real or virtual), with each other, and with instructors. Following the tenets of scientific teaching, students are encouraged to pose and answer their own questions, to make sense of the materials, and to construct their own understanding. The question I pose here is whether an additional focus—guiding students to meet these challenges in a context that explicitly promotes creativity—would enhance learning and advance students' progress toward adaptive expertise?

Assessment of Creativity

To teach creativity, there must be measurable indicators to judge how much students have gained from instruction. Educational programs intended to teach creativity became popular after the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) was introduced in the 1960s ( Torrance, 1974 ). But it soon became apparent that there were major problems in devising tests for creativity, both because of the difficulty of defining the construct and because of the number and complexity of elements that underlie it. Tests of intelligence and other personality characteristics on creative individuals revealed a host of related traits such as verbal fluency, metaphorical thinking, flexible decision making, tolerance of ambiguity, willingness to take risks, autonomy, divergent thinking, self-confidence, problem finding, ideational fluency, and belief in oneself as being “creative” ( Barron and Harrington, 1981 ; Tardif and Sternberg, 1988 ; Runco and Nemiro, 1994 ; Snyder et al. , 2004 ). Many of these traits have been the focus of extensive research of recent decades, but, as noted above, creativity is not defined by any one trait; there is now reason to believe that it is the interplay among the cognitive and affective processes that underlie inventiveness and the ability to find novel solutions to a problem.

Although the early creativity researchers recognized that assessing divergent thinking as a measure of creativity required tests for other underlying capacities ( Guilford, 1950 ; Torrance, 1974 ), these workers and their colleagues nonetheless believed that a high score for divergent thinking alone would correlate with real creative output. Unfortunately, no such correlation was shown ( Barron and Harrington, 1981 ). Results produced by many of the instruments initially designed to measure various aspects of creative thinking proved to be highly dependent on the test itself. A review of several hundred early studies showed that an individual's creativity score could be affected by simple test variables, for example, how the verbal pretest instructions were worded ( Barron and Harrington, 1981 , pp. 442–443). Most scholars now agree that divergent thinking, as originally defined, was not an adequate measure of creativity. The process of creative thinking requires a complex combination of elements that include cognitive flexibility, memory control, inhibitory control, and analogical thinking, enabling the mind to free-range and analogize, as well as to focus and test.

More recently, numerous psychometric measures have been developed and empirically tested (see Plucker and Renzulli, 1999 ) that allow more reliable and valid assessment of specific aspects of creativity. For example, the creativity quotient devised by Snyder et al. (2004) tests the ability of individuals to link different ideas and different categories of ideas into a novel synthesis. The Wallach–Kogan creativity test ( Wallach and Kogan, 1965 ) explores the uniqueness of ideas associated with a stimulus. For a more complete list and discussion, see the Creativity Tests website ( www.indiana.edu/∼bobweb/Handout/cretv_6.html ).

The most widely used measure of creativity is the TTCT, which has been modified four times since its original version in 1966 to take into account subsequent research. The TTCT-Verbal and the TTCT-Figural are two versions ( Torrance, 1998 ; see http://ststesting.com/2005giftttct.html ). The TTCT-Verbal consists of five tasks; the “stimulus” for each task is a picture to which the test-taker responds briefly in writing. A sample task that can be viewed from the TTCT Demonstrator website asks, “Suppose that people could transport themselves from place to place with just a wink of the eye or a twitch of the nose. What might be some things that would happen as a result? You have 3 min.” ( www.indiana.edu/∼bobweb/Handout/d3.ttct.htm ).

In the TTCT-Figural, participants are asked to construct a picture from a stimulus in the form of a partial line drawing given on the test sheet (see example below; Figure 1 ). Specific instructions are to “Add lines to the incomplete figures below to make pictures out of them. Try to tell complete stories with your pictures. Give your pictures titles. You have 3 min.” In the introductory materials, test-takers are urged to “… think of a picture or object that no one else will think of. Try to make it tell as complete and as interesting a story as you can …” ( Torrance et al. , 2008 , p. 2).

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Sample figural test item from the TTCT Demonstrator website ( www.indiana.edu/∼bobweb/Handout/d3.ttct.htm ).

How would an instructor in a biology course judge the creativity of students' responses to such an item? To assist in this task, the TTCT has scoring and norming guides ( Torrance, 1998 ; Torrance et al. , 2008 ) with numerous samples and responses representing different levels of creativity. The guides show sample evaluations based upon specific indicators such as fluency, originality, elaboration (or complexity), unusual visualization, extending or breaking boundaries, humor, and imagery. These examples are easy to use and provide a high degree of validity and generalizability to the tests. The TTCT has been more intensively researched and analyzed than any other creativity instrument, and the norming samples have longitudinal validations and high predictive validity over a wide age range. In addition to global creativity scores, the TTCT is designed to provide outcome measures in various domains and thematic areas to allow for more insightful analysis ( Kaufman and Baer, 2006 ). Kim (2006) has examined the characteristics of the TTCT, including norms, reliability, and validity, and concludes that the test is an accurate measure of creativity. When properly used, it has been shown to be fair in terms of gender, race, community status, and language background. According to Kim (2006) and other authorities in the field ( McIntyre et al. , 2003 ; Scott et al. , 2004 ), Torrance's research and the development of the TTCT have provided groundwork for the idea that creative levels can be measured and then increased through instruction and practice.

SCIENTIFIC TEACHING TO PROMOTE CREATIVITY

How could creativity instruction be integrated into scientific teaching.

Guidelines for designing specific course units that emphasize HOCS by using strategies of scientific teaching are now available from the current literature. As an example, Karen Cloud-Hansen and colleagues ( Cloud-Hansen et al. , 2008 ) describe a course titled, “Ciprofloxacin Resistance in Neisseria gonorrhoeae .” They developed this undergraduate seminar to introduce college freshmen to important concepts in biology within a real-world context and to increase their content knowledge and critical-thinking skills. The centerpiece of the unit is a case study in which teams of students are challenged to take the role of a director of a local public health clinic. One of the county commissioners overseeing the clinic is an epidemiologist who wants to know “how you plan to address the emergence of ciprofloxacin resistance in Neisseria gonorrhoeae ” (p. 304). State budget cuts limit availability of expensive antibiotics and some laboratory tests to patients. Student teams are challenged to 1) develop a plan to address the medical, economic, and political questions such a clinic director would face in dealing with ciprofloxacin-resistant N. gonorrhoeae ; 2) provide scientific data to support their conclusions; and 3) describe their clinic plan in a one- to two-page referenced written report.

Throughout the 3-wk unit, in accordance with the principles of problem-based instruction ( Duch et al. , 2001 ), course instructors encourage students to seek, interpret, and synthesize their own information to the extent possible. Students have access to a variety of instructional formats, and active-learning experiences are incorporated throughout the unit. These activities are interspersed among minilectures and give the students opportunities to apply new information to their existing base of knowledge. The active-learning activities emphasize the key concepts of the minilectures and directly confront common misconceptions about antibiotic resistance, gene expression, and evolution. Weekly classes include question/answer/discussion sessions to address student misconceptions and 20-min minilectures on such topics as antibiotic resistance, evolution, and the central dogma of molecular biology. Students gather information about antibiotic resistance in N. gonorrhoeae , epidemiology of gonorrhea, and treatment options for the disease, and each team is expected to formulate a plan to address ciprofloxacin resistance in N. gonorrhoeae .

In this project, the authors assessed student gains in terms of content knowledge regarding topics covered such as the role of evolution in antibiotic resistance, mechanisms of gene expression, and the role of oncogenes in human disease. They also measured HOCS as gains in problem solving, according to a rubric that assessed self-reported abilities to communicate ideas logically, solve difficult problems about microbiology, propose hypotheses, analyze data, and draw conclusions. Comparing the pre- and posttests, students reported significant learning of scientific content. Among the thinking skill categories, students demonstrated measurable gains in their ability to solve problems about microbiology but the unit seemed to have little impact on their more general perceived problem-solving skills ( Cloud-Hansen et al. , 2008 ).

What would such a class look like with the addition of explicit creativity-promoting approaches? Would the gains in problem-solving abilities have been greater if during the minilectures and other activities, students had been introduced explicitly to elements of creative thinking from the Sternberg and Williams (1998) list described above? Would the students have reported greater gains if their instructors had encouraged idea generation with weekly brainstorming sessions; if they had reminded students to cross-fertilize ideas by integrating material across subject areas; built self-efficacy by helping students believe in their own capacity to be creative; helped students question their own assumptions; and encouraged students to imagine other viewpoints and possibilities? Of most relevance, could the authors have been more explicit in assessing the originality of the student plans? In an experiment that required college students to develop plans of a different, but comparable, type, Osborn and Mumford (2006) created an originality rubric ( Figure 2 ) that could apply equally to assist instructors in judging student plans in any course. With such modifications, would student gains in problem-solving abilities or other HOCS have been greater? Would their plans have been measurably more imaginative?

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Originality rubric (adapted from Osburn and Mumford, 2006 , p. 183).

Answers to these questions can only be obtained when a course like that described by Cloud-Hansen et al. (2008) is taught with explicit instruction in creativity of the type I described above. But, such answers could be based upon more than subjective impressions of the course instructors. For example, students could be pretested with items from the TTCT-Verbal or TTCT-Figural like those shown. If, during minilectures and at every contact with instructors, students were repeatedly reminded and shown how to be as creative as possible, to integrate material across subject areas, to question their own assumptions and imagine other viewpoints and possibilities, would their scores on TTCT posttest items improve? Would the plans they formulated to address ciprofloxacin resistance become more imaginative?

Recall that in their meta-analysis, Scott et al. (2004) found that explicitly informing students about the nature of creativity and offering strategies for creative thinking were the most effective components of instruction. From their careful examination of 70 experimental studies, they concluded that approaches such as social modeling, cooperative learning, and case-based (project-based) techniques that required the application of newly acquired knowledge were positively correlated with high effect sizes. The study was clear in confirming that explicit creativity instruction can be successful in enhancing divergent thinking and problem solving. Would the same strategies work for courses in ecology and environmental biology, as detailed by Ebert-May and Hodder (2008) , or for a unit elaborated by Knight and Wood (2005) that applies classroom response clickers?

Finally, I return to my opening question with the fictional Dr. Dunne. Could a weekly brainstorming “invention session” included in a course like those described here serve as the site where students are introduced to concepts and strategies of creative problem solving? As frequently applied in schools of engineering ( Paulus and Nijstad, 2003 ), brainstorming provides an opportunity for the instructor to pose a problem and to ask the students to suggest as many solutions as possible in a brief period, thus enhancing ideational fluency. Here, students can be encouraged explicitly to build on the ideas of others and to think flexibly. Would brainstorming enhance students' divergent thinking or creative abilities as measured by TTCT items or an originality rubric? Many studies have demonstrated that group interactions such as brainstorming, under the right conditions, can indeed enhance creativity ( Paulus and Nijstad, 2003 ; Scott et al. , 2004 ), but there is little information from an undergraduate science classroom setting. Intellectual Ventures, a firm founded by Nathan Myhrvold, the creator of Microsoft's Research Division, has gathered groups of engineers and scientists around a table for day-long sessions to brainstorm about a prearranged topic. Here, the method seems to work. Since it was founded in 2000, Intellectual Ventures has filed hundreds of patent applications in more than 30 technology areas, applying the “invention session” strategy ( Gladwell, 2008 ). Currently, the company ranks among the top 50 worldwide in number of patent applications filed annually. Whether such a technique could be applied successfully in a college science course will only be revealed by future research.

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STEM Problem Solving: Inquiry, Concepts, and Reasoning

  • Published: 29 January 2022
  • Volume 32 , pages 381–397, ( 2023 )

Cite this article

  • Aik-Ling Tan   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4627-4977 1 ,
  • Yann Shiou Ong   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6092-2803 1 ,
  • Yong Sim Ng   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8400-2040 1 &
  • Jared Hong Jie Tan 1  

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Balancing disciplinary knowledge and practical reasoning in problem solving is needed for meaningful learning. In STEM problem solving, science subject matter with associated practices often appears distant to learners due to its abstract nature. Consequently, learners experience difficulties making meaningful connections between science and their daily experiences. Applying Dewey’s idea of practical and science inquiry and Bereiter’s idea of referent-centred and problem-centred knowledge, we examine how integrated STEM problem solving offers opportunities for learners to shuttle between practical and science inquiry and the kinds of knowledge that result from each form of inquiry. We hypothesize that connecting science inquiry with practical inquiry narrows the gap between science and everyday experiences to overcome isolation and fragmentation of science learning. In this study, we examine classroom talk as students engage in problem solving to increase crop yield. Qualitative content analysis of the utterances of six classes of 113 eighth graders and their teachers were conducted for 3 hours of video recordings. Analysis showed an almost equal amount of science and practical inquiry talk. Teachers and students applied their everyday experiences to generate solutions. Science talk was at the basic level of facts and was used to explain reasons for specific design considerations. There was little evidence of higher-level scientific conceptual knowledge being applied. Our observations suggest opportunities for more intentional connections of science to practical problem solving, if we intend to apply higher-order scientific knowledge in problem solving. Deliberate application and reference to scientific knowledge could improve the quality of solutions generated.

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1 Introduction

As we enter to second quarter of the twenty-first century, it is timely to take stock of both the changes and demands that continue to weigh on our education system. A recent report by World Economic Forum highlighted the need to continuously re-position and re-invent education to meet the challenges presented by the disruptions brought upon by the fourth industrial revolution (World Economic Forum, 2020 ). There is increasing pressure for education to equip children with the necessary, relevant, and meaningful knowledge, skills, and attitudes to create a “more inclusive, cohesive and productive world” (World Economic Forum, 2020 , p. 4). Further, the shift in emphasis towards twenty-first century competencies over mere acquisition of disciplinary content knowledge is more urgent since we are preparing students for “jobs that do not yet exist, technology that has not yet been invented, and problems that has yet exist” (OECD, 2018 , p. 2). Tan ( 2020 ) concurred with the urgent need to extend the focus of education, particularly in science education, such that learners can learn to think differently about possibilities in this world. Amidst this rhetoric for change, the questions that remained to be answered include how can science education transform itself to be more relevant; what is the role that science education play in integrated STEM learning; how can scientific knowledge, skills and epistemic practices of science be infused in integrated STEM learning; what kinds of STEM problems should we expose students to for them to learn disciplinary knowledge and skills; and what is the relationship between learning disciplinary content knowledge and problem solving skills?

In seeking to understand the extent of science learning that took place within integrated STEM learning, we dissected the STEM problems that were presented to students and examined in detail the sense making processes that students utilized when they worked on the problems. We adopted Dewey’s ( 1938 ) theoretical idea of scientific and practical/common-sense inquiry and Bereiter’s ideas of referent-centred and problem-centred knowledge building process to interpret teacher-students’ interactions during problem solving. There are two primary reasons for choosing these two theoretical frameworks. Firstly, Dewey’s ideas about the relationship between science inquiry and every day practical problem-solving is important in helping us understand the role of science subject matter knowledge and science inquiry in solving practical real-world problems that are commonly used in STEM learning. Secondly, Bereiter’s ideas of referent-centred and problem-centred knowledge augment our understanding of the types of knowledge that students can learn when they engage in solving practical real-world problems.

Taken together, Dewey’s and Bereiter’s ideas enable us to better understand the types of problems used in STEM learning and their corresponding knowledge that is privileged during the problem-solving process. As such, the two theoretical lenses offered an alternative and convincing way to understand the actual types of knowledge that are used within the context of integrated STEM and help to move our understanding of STEM learning beyond current focus on examining how engineering can be used as an integrative mechanism (Bryan et al., 2016 ) or applying the argument of the strengths of trans-, multi-, or inter-disciplinary activities (Bybee, 2013 ; Park et al., 2020 ) or mapping problems by the content and context as pure STEM problems, STEM-related problems or non-STEM problems (Pleasants, 2020 ). Further, existing research (for example, Gale et al., 2000 ) around STEM education focussed largely on description of students’ learning experiences with insufficient attention given to the connections between disciplinary conceptual knowledge and inquiry processes that students use to arrive at solutions to problems. Clarity in the role of disciplinary knowledge and the related inquiry will allow for more intentional design of STEM problems for students to learn higher-order knowledge. Applying Dewey’s idea of practical and scientific inquiry and Bereiter’s ideas of referent-centred and problem-centred knowledge, we analysed six lessons where students engaged with integrated STEM problem solving to propose answers to the following research questions: What is the extent of practical and scientific inquiry in integrated STEM problem solving? and What conceptual knowledge and problem-solving skills are learnt through practical and science inquiry during integrated STEM problem solving?

2 Inquiry in Problem Solving

Inquiry, according to Dewey ( 1938 ), involves the direct control of unknown situations to change them into a coherent and unified one. Inquiry usually encompasses two interrelated activities—(1) thinking about ideas related to conceptual subject-matter and (2) engaging in activities involving our senses or using specific observational techniques. The National Science Education Standards released by the National Research Council in the US in 1996 defined inquiry as “…a multifaceted activity that involves making observations; posing questions; examining books and other sources of information to see what is already known; planning investigations; reviewing what is already known in light of experimental evidence; using tools to gather, analyze, and interpret data; proposing answers, explanations, and predictions; and communicating the results. Inquiry requires identification of assumptions, use of critical and logical thinking, and consideration of alternative explanations” (p. 23). Planning investigation; collecting empirical evidence; using tools to gather, analyse and interpret data; and reasoning are common processes shared in the field of science and engineering and hence are highly relevant to apply to integrated STEM education.

In STEM education, establishing the connection between general inquiry and its application helps to link disciplinary understanding to epistemic knowledge. For instance, methods of science inquiry are popular in STEM education due to the familiarity that teachers have with scientific methods. Science inquiry, a specific form of inquiry, has appeared in many science curriculum (e.g. NRC, 2000 ) since Dewey proposed in 1910 that learning of science should be perceived as both subject-matter and a method of learning science (Dewey, 1910a , 1910b ). Science inquiry which involved ways of doing science should also encompass the ways in which students learn the scientific knowledge and investigative methods that enable scientific knowledge to be constructed. Asking scientifically orientated questions, collecting empirical evidence, crafting explanations, proposing models and reasoning based on available evidence are affordances of scientific inquiry. As such, science should be pursued as a way of knowing rather than merely acquisition of scientific knowledge.

Building on these affordances of science inquiry, Duschl and Bybee ( 2014 ) advocated the 5D model that focused on the practice of planning and carrying out investigations in science and engineering, representing two of the four disciplines in STEM. The 5D model includes science inquiry aspects such as (1) deciding on what and how to measure, observe and sample; (2) developing and selecting appropriate tools to measure and collect data; (3) recording the results and observations in a systematic manner; (4) creating ways to represent the data and patterns that are observed; and (5) determining the validity and the representativeness of the data collected. The focus on planning and carrying out investigations in the 5D model is used to help teachers bridge the gap between the practices of building and refining models and explanation in science and engineering. Indeed, a common approach to incorporating science inquiry in integrated STEM curriculum involves student planning and carrying out scientific investigations and making sense of the data collected to inform engineering design solution (Cunningham & Lachapelle, 2016 ; Roehrig et al., 2021 ). Duschl and Bybee ( 2014 ) argued that it is needful to design experiences for learners to appreciate that struggles are part of problem solving in science and engineering. They argued that “when the struggles of doing science is eliminated or simplified, learners get the wrong perceptions of what is involved when obtaining scientific knowledge and evidence” (Duschl & Bybee, 2014 , p. 2). While we concur with Duschl and Bybee about the need for struggles, in STEM learning, these struggles must be purposeful and grade appropriate so that students will also be able to experience success amidst failure.

The peculiar nature of science inquiry was scrutinized by Dewey ( 1938 ) when he cross-examined the relationship between science inquiry and other forms of inquiry, particularly common-sense inquiry. He positioned science inquiry along a continuum with general or common-sense inquiry that he termed as “logic”. Dewey argued that common-sense inquiry serves a practical purpose and exhibits features of science inquiry such as asking questions and a reliance on evidence although the focus of common-sense inquiry tends to be different. Common-sense inquiry deals with issues or problems that are in the immediate environment where people live, whereas the objects of science inquiry are more likely to be distant (e.g. spintronics) from familiar experiences in people’s daily lives. While we acknowledge the fundamental differences (such as novel discovery compared with re-discovering science, ‘messy’ science compared with ‘sanitised’ science) between school science and science that is practiced by scientists, the subject of interest in science (understanding the world around us) remains the same.

The unfamiliarity between the functionality and purpose of science inquiry to improve the daily lives of learners does little to motivate learners to learn science (Aikenhead, 2006 ; Lee & Luykx, 2006 ) since learners may not appreciate the connections of science inquiry in their day-to-day needs and wants. Bereiter ( 1992 ) has also distinguished knowledge into two forms—referent-centred and problem-centred. Referent-centred knowledge refers to subject-matter that is organised around topics such as that in textbooks. Problem-centred knowledge is knowledge that is organised around problems, whether they are transient problems, practical problems or problems of explanations. Bereiter argued that referent-centred knowledge that is commonly taught in schools is limited in their applications and meaningfulness to the lives of students. This lack of familiarity and affinity to referent-centred knowledge is likened to the science subject-matter knowledge that was mentioned by Dewey. Rather, it is problem-centred knowledge that would be useful when students encounter problems. Learning problem-centred knowledge will allow learners to readily harness the relevant knowledge base that is useful to understand and solve specific problems. This suggests a need to help learners make the meaningful connections between science and their daily lives.

Further, Dewey opined that while the contexts in which scientific knowledge arise could be different from our daily common-sense world, careful consideration of scientific activities and applying the resultant knowledge to daily situations for use and enjoyment is possible. Similarly, in arguing for problem-centred knowledge, Bereiter ( 1992 ) questioned the value of inert knowledge that plays no role in helping us understand or deal with the world around us. Referent-centred knowledge has a higher tendency to be inert due to the way that the knowledge is organised and the way that the knowledge is encountered by learners. For instance, learning about the equation and conditions for photosynthesis is not going to help learners appreciate how plants are adapted for photosynthesis and how these adaptations can allow plants to survive changes in climate and for farmers to grow plants better by creating the best growing conditions. Rather, students could be exposed to problems of explanations where they are asked to unravel the possible reasons for low crop yield and suggest possible ways to overcome the problem. Hence, we argue here that the value of the referent knowledge is that they form the basis and foundation for the students to be able to discuss or suggest ways to overcome real life problems. Referent-centred knowledge serves as part of the relevant knowledge base that can be harnessed to solve specific problems or as foundational knowledge students need to progress to learn higher-order conceptual knowledge that typically forms the foundations or pillars within a discipline. This notion of referent-centred knowledge serving as foundational knowledge that can be and should be activated for application in problem-solving situation is shown by Delahunty et al. ( 2020 ). They found that students show high reliance on memory when they are conceptualising convergent problem-solving tasks.

While Bereiter argues for problem-centred knowledge, he cautioned that engagement should be with problems of explanation rather than transient or practical problems. He opined that if learners only engage in transient or practical problem alone, they will only learn basic-category types of knowledge and fail to understand higher-order conceptual knowledge. For example, for photosynthesis, basic-level types of knowledge included facts about the conditions required for photosynthesis, listing the products formed from the process of photosynthesis and knowing that green leaves reflect green light. These basic-level knowledges should intentionally help learners learn higher-level conceptual knowledge that include learners being able to draw on the conditions for photosynthesis when they encounter that a plant is not growing well or is exhibiting discoloration of leaves.

Transient problems disappear once a solution becomes available and there is a high likelihood that we will not remember the problem after that. Practical problems, according to Bereiter are “stuck-door” problems that could be solved with or without basic-level knowledge and often have solutions that lacks precise definition. There are usually a handful of practical strategies, such as pulling or pushing the door harder, kicking the door, etc. that will work for the problems. All these solutions lack a well-defined approach related to general scientific principles that are reproducible. Problems of explanations are the most desirable types of problems for learners since these are problems that persist and recur such that they can become organising points for knowledge. Problems of explanations consist of the conceptual representations of (1) a text base that serves to represent the text content and (2) a situation model that shows the portion of the world in which the text is relevant. The idea of text base to represent text content in solving problems of explanations is like the idea of domain knowledge and structural knowledge (refers to knowledge of how concepts within a domain are connected) proposed by Jonassen ( 2000 ). He argued that both types of knowledges are required to solve a range of problems from well-structured problems to ill-structured problems with a simulated context, to simple ill-structured problems and to complex ill-structured problems.

Jonassen indicated that complex ill-structured problems are typically design problems and are likely to be the most useful forms of problems for learners to be engaged in inquiry. Complex ill-structured design problems are the “wicked” problems that Buchanan ( 1992 ) discussed. Buchanan’s idea is that design aims to incorporate knowledge from different fields of specialised inquiry to become whole. Complex or wicked problems are akin to the work of scientists who navigate multiple factors and evidence to offer models that are typically oversimplified, but they apply them to propose possible first approximation explanations or solutions and iteratively relax constraints or assumptions to refine the model. The connections between the subject matter of science and the design process to engineer a solution are delicate. While it is important to ensure that practical concerns and questions are taken into consideration in designing solutions (particularly a material artefact) to a practical problem, the challenge here lies in ensuring that creativity in design is encouraged even if students initially lack or neglect the scientific conceptual understanding to explain/justify their design. In his articulation of wicked problems and the role of design thinking, Buchanan ( 1992 ) highlighted the need to pay attention to category and placement. Categories “have fixed meanings that are accepted within the framework of a theory or a philosophy and serve as the basis for analyzing what already exist” (Buchanan, 1992 , p. 12). Placements, on the other hand, “have boundaries to shape and constrain meaning, but are not rigidly fixed and determinate” (p. 12).

The difference in the ideas presented by Dewey and Bereiter lies in the problem design. For Dewey, scientific knowledge could be learnt from inquiring into practical problems that learners are familiar with. After all, Dewey viewed “modern science as continuous with, and to some degree an outgrowth and refinement of, practical or ‘common-sense’ inquiry” (Brown, 2012 ). For Bereiter, he acknowledged the importance of familiar experiences, but instead of using them as starting points for learning science, he argued that practical problems are limiting in helping learners acquire higher-order knowledge. Instead, he advocated for learners to organize their knowledge around problems that are complex, persistent and extended and requiring explanations to better understand the problems. Learners are to have a sense of the kinds of problems to which the specific concept is relevant before they can be said to have grasp the concept in a functionally useful way.

To connect between problem solving, scientific knowledge and everyday experiences, we need to examine ways to re-negotiate the disciplinary boundaries (such as epistemic understanding, object of inquiry, degree of precision) of science and make relevant connections to common-sense inquiry and to the problem at hand. Integrated STEM appears to be one way in which the disciplinary boundaries of science can be re-negotiated to include practices from the fields of technology, engineering and mathematics. In integrated STEM learning, inquiry is seen more holistically as a fluid process in which the outcomes are not absolute but are tentative. The fluidity of the inquiry process is reflected in the non-deterministic inquiry approach. This means that students can use science inquiry, engineering design, design process or any other inquiry approaches that fit to arrive at the solution. This hybridity of inquiry between science, common-sense and problems allows for some familiar aspects of the science inquiry process to be applied to understand and generate solutions to familiar everyday problems. In attempting to infuse elements of common-sense inquiry with science inquiry in problem-solving, logic plays an important role to help learners make connections. Hypothetically, we argue that with increasing exposure to less familiar ways of thinking such as those associated with science inquiry, students’ familiarity with scientific reasoning increases, and hence such ways of thinking gradually become part of their common-sense, which students could employ to solve future relevant problems. The theoretical ideas related to complexities of problems, the different forms of inquiry afforded by different problems and the arguments for engaging in problem solving motivated us to examine empirically how learners engage with ill-structured problems to generate problem-centred knowledge. Of particular interest to us is how learners and teachers weave between practical and scientific reasoning as they inquire to integrate the components in the original problem into a unified whole.

3.1 Context

The integrated STEM activity in our study was planned using the S-T-E-M quartet instructional framework (Tan et al., 2019 ). The S-T-E-M quartet instructional framework positions complex, persistent and extended problems at its core and focusses on the vertical disciplinary knowledge and understanding of the horizontal connections between the disciplines that could be gained by learners through solving the problem (Tan et al., 2019 ). Figure  1 depicts the disciplinary aspects of the problem that was presented to the students. The activity has science and engineering as the two lead disciplines. It spanned three 1-h lessons and required students to both learn and apply relevant scientific conceptual knowledge to solve a complex, real-world problem through processes that resemble the engineering design process (Wheeler et al., 2019 ).

figure 1

Connections across disciplines in integrate STEM activity

figure 2

Frequency of different types of reasoning

In the first session (1 h), students were introduced to the problem and its context. The problem pertains to the issue of limited farmland in a land scarce country that imports 90% of food (Singapore Food Agency [SFA], 2020 ). The students were required to devise a solution by applying knowledge of the conditions required for photosynthesis and plant growth to design and build a vertical farming system to help farmers increase crop yield with limited farmland. This context was motivated by the government’s effort to generate interests and knowledge in farming to achieve the 30 by 30 goal—supplying 30% of country’s nutritional needs by 2030. The scenario was a fictitious one where they were asked to produce 120 tonnes of Kailan (a type of leafy vegetable) with two hectares of land instead of the usual six hectares over a specific period. In addition to the abovementioned constraints, the teacher also discussed relevant success criteria for evaluating the solution with the students. Students then researched about existing urban farming approaches. They were given reading materials pertaining to urban farming to help them understand the affordances and constraints of existing solutions. In the second session (6 h), students engaged in ideation to generate potential solutions. They then designed, built and tested their solution and had opportunities to iteratively refine their solution. Students were given a list of materials (e.g. mounting board, straws, ice-cream stick, glue, etc.) that they could use to design their solutions. In the final session (1 h), students presented their solution and reflected on how well their solution met the success criteria. The prior scientific conceptual knowledge that students require to make sense of the problem include knowledge related to plant nutrition, namely, conditions for photosynthesis, nutritional requirements of Kailin and growth cycle of Kailin. The problem resembles a real-world problem that requires students to engage in some level of explanation of their design solution.

A total of 113 eighth graders (62 boys and 51 girls), 14-year-olds, from six classes and their teachers participated in the study. The students and their teachers were recruited as part of a larger study that examined the learning experiences of students when they work on integrated STEM activities that either begin with a problem, a solution or are focused on the content. Invitations were sent to schools across the country and interested schools opted in for the study. For the study reported here, all students and teachers were from six classes within a school. The teachers had all undergone 3 h of professional development with one of the authors on ways of implementing the integrated STEM activity used in this study. During the professional development session, the teachers learnt about the rationale of the activity, familiarize themselves with the materials and clarified the intentions and goals of the activity. The students were mostly grouped in groups of three, although a handful of students chose to work independently. The group size of students was not critical for the analysis of talk in this study as the analytic focus was on the kinds of knowledge applied rather than collaborative or group think. We assumed that the types of inquiry adopted by teachers and students were largely dependent on the nature of problem. Eighth graders were chosen for this study since lower secondary science offered at this grade level is thematic and integrated across biology, chemistry and physics. Furthermore, the topic of photosynthesis is taught under the theme of Interactions at eighth grade (CPDD, 2021 ). This thematic and integrated nature of science at eighth grade offered an ideal context and platform for integrated STEM activities to be trialled.

The final lessons in a series of three lessons in each of the six classes was analysed and reported in this study. Lessons where students worked on their solutions were not analysed because the recordings had poor audibility due to masking and physical distancing requirements as per COVID-19 regulations. At the start of the first lesson, the instructions given by the teacher were:

You are going to present your models. Remember the scenario that you were given at the beginning that you were tasked to solve using your model. …. In your presentation, you have to present your prototype and its features, what is so good about your prototype, how it addresses the problem and how it saves costs and space. So, this is what you can talk about during your presentation. ….. pay attention to the presentation and write down questions you like to ask the groups after the presentation… you can also critique their model, you can evaluate, critique and ask questions…. Some examples of questions you can ask the groups are? Do you think your prototype can achieve optimal plant growth? You can also ask questions specific to their models.

3.2 Data collection

Parental consent was sought a month before the start of data collection. The informed consent adhered to confidentiality and ethics guidelines as described by the Institutional Review Board. The data collection took place over a period of one month with weekly video recording. Two video cameras, one at the front and one at the back of the science laboratory were set up. The front camera captured the students seated at the front while the back video camera recorded the teacher as well as the groups of students at the back of the laboratory. The video recordings were synchronized so that the events captured from each camera can be interpreted from different angles. After transcription of the raw video files, the identities of students were substituted with pseudonyms.

3.3 Data analysis

The video recordings were analysed using the qualitative content analysis approach. Qualitative content analysis allows for patterns or themes and meanings to emerge from the process of systematic classification (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005 ). Qualitative content analysis is an appropriate analytic method for this study as it allows us to systematically identify episodes of practical inquiry and science inquiry to map them to the purposes and outcomes of these episodes as each lesson unfolds.

In total, six h of video recordings where students presented their ideas while the teachers served as facilitator and mentor were analysed. The video recordings were transcribed, and the transcripts were analysed using the NVivo software. Our unit of analysis is a single turn of talk (one utterance). We have chosen to use utterances as proxy indicators of reasoning practices based on the assumption that an utterance relates to both grammar and context. An utterance is a speech act that reveals both meaning and intentions of the speaker within specific contexts (Li, 2008 ).

Our research analytical lens is also interpretative in nature and the validity of our interpretation is through inter-rater discussion and agreement. Each utterance at the speaker level in transcripts was examined and coded either as relevant to practical reasoning or scientific reasoning based on the content. The utterances could be a comment by the teacher, a question by a student or a response by another student. Deductive coding is deployed with the two codes, practical reasoning and scientific reasoning derived from the theoretical ideas of Dewey and Bereiter as described earlier. Practical reasoning refers to utterances that reflect commonsensical knowledge or application of everyday understanding. Scientific reasoning refers to utterances that consist of scientifically oriented questions, scientific terms, or the use of empirical evidence to explain. Examples of each type of reasoning are highlighted in the following section. Each coded utterance is then reviewed for detailed description of the events that took place that led to that specific utterance. The description of the context leading to the utterance is considered an episode. The episodes and codes were discussed and agreed upon by two of the authors. Two coders simultaneously watched the videos to identify and code the episodes. The coders interpreted the content of each utterance, examine the context where the utterance was made and deduced the purpose of the utterance. Once each coder has established the sense-making aspect of the utterance in relation to the context, a code of either practical reasoning or scientific reasoning is assigned. Once that was completed, the two coders compared their coding for similarities and differences. They discussed the differences until an agreement was reached. Through this process, an agreement of 85% was reached between the coders. Where disagreement persisted, codes of the more experienced coder were adopted.

4 Results and Discussion

The specific STEM lessons analysed were taken from the lessons whereby students presented the model of their solutions to the class for peer evaluation. Every group of students stood in front of the class and placed their model on the bench as they presented. There was also a board where they could sketch or write their explanations should they want to. The instructions given by the teacher to the students were to explain their models and state reasons for their design.

4.1 Prevalence of Reasoning

The 6h of videos consists of 1422 turns of talk. Three hundred four turns of talk (21%) were identified as talk related to reasoning, either practical reasoning or scientific reasoning. Practical reasoning made up 62% of the reasoning turns while 38% were scientific reasoning (Fig. 2 ).

The two types of reasoning differ in the justifications that are used to substantiate the claims or decisions made. Table 1 describes the differences between the two categories of reasoning.

4.2 Applications of Scientific Reasoning

Instances of engagement with scientific reasoning (for instance, using scientific concepts to justify, raising scientifically oriented questions, or providing scientific explanations) revolved around the conditions for photosynthesis and the concept of energy conversion when students were presenting their ideas or when they were questioned by their peers. For example, in explaining the reason for including fish in their plant system, one group of students made connection to cyclical energy transfer: “…so as the roots of the plants submerged in the water, faeces from the fish will be used as fertilizers so that the plant can grow”. The students considered how organic matter that is still trapped within waste materials can be released and taken up by plants to enhance the growth. The application of scientific reasoning made their design one that is innovative and sustainable as evaluated by the teacher. Some students attempted more ecofriendly designs by considering energy efficiencies through incorporating water turbines in their farming systems. They applied the concept of different forms of energy and energy conversion when their peers inquired about their design. The same scientific concepts were explained at different levels of details by different students. At one level, the students explained in a purely descriptive manner of what happens to the different entities in their prototypes, with implied changes to the forms of energy─ “…spins then generates electricity. So right, when the water falls down, then it will spin. The water will fall on the fan blade thing, then it will spin and then it generates electricity. So, it saves electricity, and also saves water”. At another level, students defended their design through an explanation of energy conversion─ “…because when the water flows right, it will convert gravitational potential energy so, when it reaches the bottom, there is not really much gravitational potential energy”. While these instances of applying scientific reasoning indicated that students have knowledge about the scientific phenomena and can apply them to assist in the problem-solving process, we are not able to establish if students understood the science behind how the dynamo works to generate electricity. Students in eighth grade only need to know how a generator works at a descriptive level and the specialized understanding how a dynamo works is beyond the intended learning outcomes at this grade level.

The application of scientific concepts for justification may not always be accurate. For instance, the naïve conception that students have about plants only respiring at night and not in the day surfaced when one group of students tried to justify the growth rates of Kailan─ “…I mean, they cannot be making food 24/7 and growing 24/7. They have nighttime for a reason. They need to respire”. These students do not appreciate that plants respire in the day as well, and hence respiration occurs 24/7. This naïve conception that plants only respire at night is one that is common among learners of biology (e.g. Svandova, 2014 ) since students learn that plant gives off oxygen in the day and takes in oxygen at night. The hasty conclusion to that observation is that plants carry out photosynthesis in the day and respire at night. The relative rates of photosynthesis and respiration were not considered by many students.

Besides naïve conceptions, engagement with scientific ideas to solve a practical problem offers opportunities for unusual and alternative ideas about science to surface. For instance, another group of students explained that they lined up their plants so that “they can take turns to absorb sunlight for photosynthesis”. These students appear to be explaining that the sun will move and depending on the position of the sun, some plants may be under shade, and hence rates of photosynthesis are dependent on the position of the sun. However, this idea could also be interpreted as (1) the students failed to appreciate that sunlight is everywhere, and (2) plants, unlike animals, particularly humans, do not have the concept of turn-taking. These diverse ideas held by students surfaced when students were given opportunities to apply their knowledge of photosynthesis to solve a problem.

4.3 Applications of Practical Reasoning

Teachers and students used more practical reasoning during an integrated STEM activity requiring both science and engineering practices as seen from 62% occurrence of practical reasoning compared with 38% for scientific reasoning. The intention of the activity to integrate students’ scientific knowledge related to plant nutrition to engineering practice of building a model of vertical farming system could be the reason for the prevalence of practical reasoning. The practical reasoning used related to structural design considerations of the farming system such as how water, light and harvesting can be carried out in the most efficient manner. Students defended the strengths of designs using logic based on their everyday experiences. In the excerpt below (transcribed verbatim), we see students applied their everyday experiences when something is “thinner” (likely to mean narrower), logically it would save space. Further, to reach a higher level, you use a machine to climb up.

Excerpt 1. “Thinner, more space” Because it is more thinner, so like in terms of space, it’s very convenient. So right, because there is – because it rotates right, so there is this button where you can stop it. Then I also installed steps, so that – because there are certain places you can’t reach even if you stop the – if you stop the machine, so when you stop it and you climb up, and then you see the condition of the plants, even though it costs a lot of labour, there is a need to have an experienced person who can grow plants. Then also, when like – when water reach the plants, cos the plants I want to use is soil-based, so as the water reach the soil, the soil will xxx, so like the water will be used, and then we got like – and then there’s like this filter that will filter like the dirt.

In the examples of practical reasoning, we were not able to identify instances where students and teachers engaged with discussion around trade-off and optimisation. Understanding constraints, trade-offs and optimisations are important ideas in informed design matrix for engineering as suggested by Crismond and Adams ( 2012 ). For instance, utterances such as “everything will be reused”, “we will be saving space”, “it looks very flimsy” or “so that it can contains [sic] the plants” were used. These utterances were made both by students while justifying their own prototypes and also by peers who challenged the design of others. Longer responses involving practical reasoning were made based on common-sense, everyday logic─ “…the product does not require much manpower, so other than one or two supervisors like I said just now, to harvest the Kailan, hence, not too many people need to be used, need to be hired to help supervise the equipment and to supervise the growth”. We infer that the higher instances of utterances related to practical reasoning could be due to the presence of more concrete artefacts that is shown, and the students and teachers were more focused on questioning the structure at hand. This inference was made as instructions given by the teacher at the start of students’ presentation focus largely on the model rather than the scientific concepts or reasoning behind the model.

4.4 Intersection Between Scientific and Practical Reasoning

Comparing science subject matter knowledge and problem-solving to the idea of categories and placement (Buchanan, 1992 ), subject matter is analogous to categories where meanings are fixed with well-established epistemic practices and norms. The problem-solving process and design of solutions are likened to placements where boundaries are less rigid, hence opening opportunities for students’ personal experiences and ideas to be presented. Placements allow students to apply their knowledge from daily experiences and common-sense logic to justify decisions. Common-sense knowledge and logic are more accessible, and hence we observe higher frequency of usage. Comparatively, while science subject matter (categories) is also used, it is observed less frequently. This could possibly be due either to less familiarity with the subject matter or lack of appropriate opportunity to apply in practical problem solving. The challenge for teachers during implementation of a STEM problem-solving activity, therefore, lies in the balance of the application of scientific and practical reasoning to deepen understanding of disciplinary knowledge in the context of solving a problem in a meaningful manner.

Our observations suggest that engaging students with practical inquiry tasks with some engineering demands such as the design of modern farm systems offers opportunities for them to convert their personal lived experiences into feasible concrete ideas that they can share in a public space for critique. The peer critique following the sharing of their practical ideas allows for both practical and scientific questions to be asked and for students to defend their ideas. For instance, after one group of students presented their prototype that has silvered surfaces, a student asked a question: “what is the function of the silver panels?”, to which his peers replied : “Makes the light bounce. Bounce the sunlight away and then to other parts of the tray.” This question indicated that students applied their knowledge that shiny silvered surfaces reflect light, and they used this knowledge to disperse the light to other trays where the crops were growing. An example of a practical question asked was “what is the purpose of the ladder?”, to which the students replied: “To take the plants – to refill the plants, the workers must climb up”. While the process of presentation and peer critique mimic peer review in the science inquiry process, the conceptual knowledge of science may not always be evident as students paid more attention to the design constraints such as lighting, watering, and space that was set in the activity. Given the context of growing plants, engagement with the science behind nutritional requirements of plants, the process of photosynthesis, and the adaptations of plants could be more deliberately explored.

5 Conclusion

The goal of our work lies in applying the theoretical ideas of Dewey and Bereiter to better understand reasoning practices in integrate STEM problem solving. We argue that this is a worthy pursue to better understand the roles of scientific reasoning in practical problem solving. One of the goals of integrated STEM education in schools is to enculture students into the practices of science, engineering and mathematics that include disciplinary conceptual knowledge, epistemic practices, and social norms (Kelly & Licona, 2018 ). In the integrated form, the boundaries and approaches to STEM learning are more diverse compared with monodisciplinary ways of problem solving. For instance, in integrated STEM problem solving, besides scientific investigations and explanations, students are also required to understand constraints, design optimal solutions within specific parameters and even to construct prototypes. For students to learn the ways of speaking, doing and being as they participate in integrated STEM problem solving in schools in a meaningful manner, students could benefit from these experiences.

With reference to the first research question of What is the extent of practical and scientific reasoning in integrated STEM problem solving, our analysis suggests that there are fewer instances of scientific reasoning compared with practical reasoning. Considering the intention of integrated STEM learning and adopting Bereiter’s idea that students should learn higher-order conceptual knowledge through engagement with problem solving, we argue for a need for scientific reasoning to be featured more strongly in integrated STEM lessons so that students can gain higher order scientific conceptual knowledge. While the lessons observed were strong in design and building, what was missing in generating solutions was the engagement in investigations, where learners collected or are presented with data and make decisions about the data to allow them to assess how viable the solutions are. Integrated STEM problems can be designed so that science inquiry can be infused, such as carrying out investigations to figure out relationships between variables. Duschl and Bybee ( 2014 ) have argued for the need to engage students in problematising science inquiry and making choices about what works and what does not.

With reference to the second research question , What is achieved through practical and scientific reasoning during integrated STEM problem solving? , our analyses suggest that utterance for practical reasoning are typically used to justify the physical design of the prototype. These utterances rely largely on what is observable and are associated with basic-level knowledge and experiences. The higher frequency of utterances related to practical reasoning and the nature of the utterances suggests that engagement with practical reasoning is more accessible since they relate more to students’ lived experiences and common-sense. Bereiter ( 1992 ) has urged educators to engage learners in learning that is beyond basic-level knowledge since accumulation of basic-level knowledge does not lead to higher-level conceptual learning. Students should be encouraged to use scientific knowledge also to justify their prototype design and to apply scientific evidence and logic to support their ideas. Engagement with scientific reasoning is preferred as conceptual knowledge, epistemic practices and social norms of science are more widely recognised compared with practical reasoning that are likely to be more varied since they rely on personal experiences and common-sense. This leads us to assert that both context and content are important in integrated STEM learning. Understanding the context or the solution without understanding the scientific principles that makes it work makes the learning less meaningful since we “…cannot strip learning of its context, nor study it in a ‘neutral’ context. It is always situated, always relayed to some ongoing enterprise”. (Bruner, 2004 , p. 20).

To further this discussion on how integrated STEM learning experiences harness the ideas of practical and scientific reasoning to move learners from basic-level knowledge to higher-order conceptual knowledge, we propose the need for further studies that involve working with teachers to identify and create relevant problems-of-explanations that focuses on feasible, worthy inquiry ideas such as those related to specific aspects of transportation, alternative energy sources and clean water that have impact on the local community. The design of these problems can incorporate opportunities for systematic scientific investigations and scaffolded such that there are opportunities to engage in epistemic practices of the constitute disciplines of STEM. Researchers could then examine the impact of problems-of-explanations on students’ learning of higher order scientific concepts. During the problem-solving process, more attention can be given to elicit students’ initial and unfolding ideas (practical) and use them as a basis to start the science inquiry process. Researchers can examine how to encourage discussions that focus on making meaning of scientific phenomena that are embedded within specific problems. This will help students to appreciate how data can be used as evidence to support scientific explanations as well as justifications for the solutions to problems. With evidence, learners can be guided to work on reasoning the phenomena with explanatory models. These aspects should move engagement in integrated STEM problem solving from being purely practice to one that is explanatory.

6 Limitations

There are four key limitations of our study. Firstly, the degree of generalisation of our observations is limited. This study sets out to illustrate what how Dewey and Bereiter’s ideas can be used as lens to examine knowledge used in problem-solving. As such, the findings that we report here is limited in its ability to generalise across different contexts and problems. Secondly, the lessons that were analysed came from teacher-frontal teaching and group presentation of solution and excluded students’ group discussions. We acknowledge that there could potentially be talk that could involve practical and scientific reasonings within group work. There are two practical consideration for choosing to analyse the first and presentation segments of the suite of lesson. Firstly, these two lessons involved participation from everyone in class and we wanted to survey the use of practical and scientific reasoning by the students as a class. Secondly, methodologically, clarity of utterances is important for accurate analysis and as students were wearing face masks during the data collection, their utterances during group discussions lack the clarity for accurate transcription and analysis. Thirdly, insights from this study were gleaned from a small sample of six classes of students. Further work could involve more classes of students although that could require more resources devoted to analysis of the videos. Finally, the number of students varied across groups and this could potentially affect the reasoning practices during discussions.

Data Availability

The datasets used and analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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This study is funded by Office of Education Research grant OER 24/19 TAL.

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Tan, AL., Ong, Y.S., Ng, Y.S. et al. STEM Problem Solving: Inquiry, Concepts, and Reasoning. Sci & Educ 32 , 381–397 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-021-00310-2

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A Detailed Characterization of the Expert Problem-Solving Process in Science and Engineering: Guidance for Teaching and Assessment

  • Argenta M. Price
  • Candice J. Kim
  • Eric W. Burkholder
  • Amy V. Fritz
  • Carl E. Wieman

*Address correspondence to: Argenta M. Price ( E-mail Address: [email protected] ).

Department of Physics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305

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Graduate School of Education, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305

School of Medicine, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305

Department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305

A primary goal of science and engineering (S&E) education is to produce good problem solvers, but how to best teach and measure the quality of problem solving remains unclear. The process is complex, multifaceted, and not fully characterized. Here, we present a detailed characterization of the S&E problem-solving process as a set of specific interlinked decisions. This framework of decisions is empirically grounded and describes the entire process. To develop this, we interviewed 52 successful scientists and engineers (“experts”) spanning different disciplines, including biology and medicine. They described how they solved a typical but important problem in their work, and we analyzed the interviews in terms of decisions made. Surprisingly, we found that across all experts and fields, the solution process was framed around making a set of just 29 specific decisions. We also found that the process of making those discipline-general decisions (selecting between alternative actions) relied heavily on domain-specific predictive models that embodied the relevant disciplinary knowledge. This set of decisions provides a guide for the detailed measurement and teaching of S&E problem solving. This decision framework also provides a more specific, complete, and empirically based description of the “practices” of science.

INTRODUCTION

Many faculty members with new graduate students and many managers with employees who are recent college graduates have had similar experiences. Their advisees/employees have just completed a program of rigorous course work, often with distinction, but they seem unable to solve the real-world problems they encounter. The supervisor struggles to figure out exactly what the problem is and how they can guide the person in overcoming it. This paper is providing a way to answer those questions in the context of science and engineering (S&E). By characterizing the problem-solving process of experts, this paper investigates the “mastery” performance level and specifies an overarching learning goal for S&E students, which can be taught and measured to improve teaching.

The importance of problem solving as an educational outcome has long been recognized, but too often postsecondary S&E graduates have serious difficulties when confronted with real-world problems ( Quacquarelli Symonds, 2018 ). This reflects two long-standing educational problems with regard to problem solving: how to properly measure it, and how to effectively teach it. We theorize that the root of these difficulties is that good “problem solving” is a complex multifaceted process, and the details of that process have not been sufficiently characterized. Better characterization of the problem-solving process is necessary to allow problem solving, and more particularly, the complex set of skills and knowledge it entails, to be measured and taught more effectively. We sought to create an empirically grounded conceptual framework that would characterize the detailed structure of the full problem-solving process used by skilled practitioners when solving problems as part of their work. We also wanted a framework that would allow use and comparison across S&E disciplines. To create such a framework, we examined the operational decisions (choices among alternatives that result in subsequent actions) that these practitioners make when solving problems in their discipline.

Various aspects of problem solving have been studied across multiple domains, using a variety of methods (e.g., Newell and Simon, 1972 ; Dunbar, 2000 ; National Research Council [NRC], 2012b ; Lintern et al. , 2018 ). These ranged from expert self-reflections (e.g., Polya, 1945 ), to studies on knowledge lean tasks to discover general problem-solving heuristics (e.g., Egan and Greeno, 1974 ), to comparisons of expert and novice performances on simplified problems across a variety of disciplines (e.g., Chase and Simon, 1973 ; Chi et al. , 1981 ; Larkin and Reif, 1979 ; Ericsson et al. , 2006 , 2018 ). These studies revealed important novice–expert differences—notably, that experts are better at identifying important features and have knowledge structures that allow them to reduce demands on working memory. Studies that specifically gave the experts unfamiliar problems in their disciplines also found that, relative to novices, they had more deliberate and reflective strategies, including more extensive planning and managing of their own behavior, and they could use their knowledge base to better define the problem ( Schoenfeld, 1985 ; Wineburg, 1998 ; Singh, 2002 ). While these studies focused on discrete cognitive steps of the individual, an alternative framing of problem solving has been in terms of “ecological psychology” of “situativity,” looking at how the problem solver views and interacts with the environment in terms of affordances and constraints ( Greeno, 1994 ). “Naturalistic decision making” is a related framework that specifically examines how experts make decisions in complex, real-world, settings, with an emphasis on the importance of assessing the situation surrounding the problem at hand ( Klein, 2008 ; Mosier et al. , 2018 ).

While this work on expertise has provided important insights into the problem-solving process, its focus has been limited. Most has focused on looking for cognitive differences between experts and novices using limited and targeted tasks, such as remembering the pieces on a chessboard ( Chase and Simon, 1973 ) or identifying the important concepts represented in an introductory physics textbook problem ( Chi et al. , 1981 ). It did not attempt to explore the full process of solving, particularly for solving the type of complex problem that a scientist or engineer encounters as a member of the workforce (“authentic problems”).

There have also been many theoretical proposals as to expert problem-solving practices, but with little empirical evidence as to their completeness or accuracy (e.g., Polya, 1945 ; Heller and Reif, 1984 ; Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD], 2019 ). The work of Dunbar (2000) is a notable exception to the lack of empirical work, as his group did examine how biologists solved problems in their work by analyzing lab meetings held by eight molecular biology research groups. His groundbreaking work focused on creativity and discovery in the research process, and he identified the importance of analogical reasoning and distributed reasoning by scientists in answering research questions and gaining new insights. Kozma et al. (2000) studied professional chemists solving problems, but their work focused only on the use of specialized representations.

The “cognitive systems engineering” approach ( Lintern et al. , 2018 ) takes a more empirically based approach looking at experts solving problems in their work, and as such tends to span aspects of both the purely cognitive and the ecological psychological theories. It uses both observations of experts in authentic work settings and retrospective interviews about how experts carried out particular work tasks. This theoretical framing and the experimental methods are similar to what we use, particularly in the “naturalistic decision making” area of research ( Mosier et al. , 2018 ). That work looks at how critical decisions are made in solving specific problems in their real-world setting. The decision process is studied primarily through retrospective interviews about challenging cases faced by experts. As described below, our methods are adapted from that work ( Crandall et al. , 2006 ), though there are some notable differences in focus and field. A particular difference is that we focused on identifying what are decisions to be made, which are more straight-forward to identify from retrospective interviews than how those decisions are made. We all have the same ultimate goal, however, to improve the training/teaching of the respective expertise.

Problem solving is central to the processes of science, engineering, and medicine, so research and educational standards about scientific thinking and the process and practices of science are also relevant to this discussion. Work by Osborne and colleagues describes six styles of scientific reasoning that can be used to explain how scientists and students approach different problems ( Kind and Osborne, 2016 ). There are also numerous educational standards and frameworks that, based on theory, lay out the skills or practices that science and engineering students are expected to master (e.g., American Association for the Advancement of Science [AAAS], 2011 ; Next Generation Science Standards Lead States, 2013 ; OECD, 2019 ; ABET, 2020 ). More specifically related to the training of problem solving, Priemer et al. (2020) synthesizes literature on problem solving and scientific reasoning to create a “STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] and computer science framework for problem solving” that lays out steps that could be involved in a students’ problem-solving efforts across STEM fields. These frameworks provide a rich groundwork, but they have several limitations: 1) They are based on theoretical ideas of the practice of science, not empirical evidence, so while each framework contains overlapping elements of the problem-solving process, it is unclear whether they capture the complete process. 2) They are focused on school science, rather than the actual problem solving that practitioners carry out and that students will need to carry out in future STEM careers. 3) They are typically underspecified, so that the steps or practices apply generally, but it is difficult to translate them into measurable learning goals for students to practice. Working to address that, Clemmons et al. (2020) recently sought to operationalize the core competencies from the Vision and Change report ( AAAS, 2011 ), establishing a set of skills that biology students should be able to master.

Our work seeks to augment this prior work by building a conceptual framework that is empirically based, grounded in how scientists and engineers solve problems in practice instead of in school. We base our framework on the decisions that need to be made during problem solving, which makes each item clearly defined for practice and assessment. In our analysis of expert problem solving, we empirically identified the entire problem-solving process. We found this includes deciding when and how to use the steps and skills defined in the work described previously but also includes additional elements. There are also questions in the literature about how generalizable across fields a particular set of practices may be. Here, we present the first empirical examination of the entire problem-solving process, and we compare that process across many different S&E disciplines.

A variety of instructional methods have been used to try and teach science and engineering problem solving, but there has been little evidence of their efficacy at improving problem solving (for a review, see NRC, 2012b ). Research explicitly on teaching problem solving has primarily focused on textbook-type exercises and utilized step-by-step strategies or heuristics. These studies have shown limited success, often getting students to follow specific procedural steps but with little gain in actually solving problems and showing some potential drawbacks ( Heller and Reif, 1984 ; Heller et al. , 1992 ; Huffman, 1997 ; Heckler, 2010 ; Kuo et al. , 2017 ). As discussed later, the framework presented here offers guidance for different and potentially more effective approaches to teaching problem solving.

These challenges can be illustrated by considering three different problems taken from courses in mechanical engineering, physics, and biology, respectively ( Figure 1 ). All of these problems are challenging, requiring considerable knowledge and effort by the student to solve correctly. Problems such as these are routinely used to both assess students’ problem-solving skills, and students are expected to learn such skills by practicing doing such problems. However, it is obvious to any expert in the respective fields, that, while these problems might be complicated and difficult to answer, they are vastly different from solving authentic problems in that field. They all have well-defined answers that can be reached by straightforward solution paths. More specifically, they do not involve needing to use judgment to make any decisions based on limited information (e.g., insufficient to specify a correct decision with certainty). The relevant concepts and information and assumptions are all stated or obvious. The failure of problems like these to capture the complexity of authentic problem solving underlies the failure of efforts to measure and teach problem solving. Recognizing this failure motivated our efforts to more completely characterize the problem-solving process of practicing scientists, engineers, and doctors.

FIGURE 1. Example problems from courses or textbooks in mechanical engineering, physics and biology. Problems from: Mechanical engineering: Wayne State mechanical engineering sample exam problems (Wayne State, n.d.), Physics: A standard physics problem in nearly every advanced quantum mechanics course, Biology: Molecular Biology of the Cell 6th edition, Chapter 7 end of chapter problems ( Alberts et al ., 2014 ).

We are building on the previous work studying expert–novice differences and problem solving but taking a different direction. We sought to create an empirically grounded framework that would characterize the detailed structure of the full problem-solving process by focusing on the operational decisions that skilled practitioners make when successfully solving authentic problems in their scientific, engineering, or medical work. We chose to identify the decisions that S&E practitioners made, because, unlike potentially nebulous skills or general problem-solving steps that might change with the discipline, decisions are sufficiently specified that they can be individually practiced by students and measured by instructors or departments. The authentic problems that we analyzed are typical problems practitioners encounter in “doing” the science or engineering entailed in their jobs. In the language of traditional problem-
solving and expertise research, such authentic problems are “ill-structured” ( Simon, 1973 ) and require “adaptive expertise” ( Hatano and Inagaki, 1986 ) to solve. However, our authentic problems are considerably more complex and unstructured than what is normally considered in those literatures, because not only do they lack a clear solution path, but in many cases, it is not clear a priori that they have any solution at all. Determining that, and whether the problem needs to be redefined to be soluble, is part of the successful expert solution process. Another way in which our set of decisions goes beyond the characterization of what is involved in adaptive expertise is the prominent role of making judgments with limited information.

A common reaction of scientists and engineers to seeing the list of decisions we obtain as our primary result is, “Oh, yes, these are things I always do in solving problems. There is nothing new here.” It is comforting that these decisions all look familiar; that supports their validity. However, what is new is not that experts are making such decisions, but rather that there is a relatively small but complete set of decisions that has now been explicitly identified and that applies so generally.

We have used a much larger and broader sample of experts in this work than used in prior expert–novice studies, and we used a more stringent selection criterion. Previous empirical work has typically involved just a few experts, almost always in a single domain, and included graduate students as “experts” in some cases. Our semistructured interview sample was 31 experienced practitioners from 10 different disciplines of science, engineering, and medicine, with demonstrated competence and accomplishments well beyond those of most graduate students. Also, approximately 25 additional experts from across science, engineering, and medicine served as consultants during the planning and execution of this work.

Our research question was: What are the decisions experts make in solving authentic problems, and to what extent is this set of decisions to be made consistent both within and across disciplines?

Our approach was designed to identify the level of consistency and unique differences across disciplines. Our hypothesis was that there would be a manageable number (20–50) of decisions to be made, with a large amount of overlap of decisions made between experts within each discipline and a substantial but smaller overlap across disciplines. We believed that if we had found that every expert and/or discipline used a large and completely unique set of decisions, it would have been an interesting research result but of little further use. If our hypothesis turned out to be correct, we expected that the set of decisions obtained would have useful applications in guiding teaching and assessment, as they would show how experts in the respective disciplines applied their content knowledge to solve problems and hence provide a model for what to teach. We were not expecting to find the nearly complete degree of overlap in the decisions made across all the experts.

We first conducted 22 relatively unstructured interviews with a range of S&E experts, in which we asked about problem-solving expertise in their fields. From these interviews, we developed an initial list of decisions to be made in S&E problem solving. To refine and validate the list, we then carried out a set of 31 semistructured interviews in which S&E experts chose a specific problem from their work and described the solution process in detail. The semistructured interviews were coded for the decisions represented, either explicitly stated or implied by a choice of action. This provided a framework of decisions that characterize the problem-solving process across S&E disciplines. The research was approved by the Stanford Institutional Review Board (IRB no. 48785), and informed consent was obtained from all the participants.

This work involved interviewing many experts across different fields. We defined experts as practicing scientists, engineers, or physicians with considerable experience working as faculty at highly rated universities or having several years of experience working in moderately high-level technical positions at successful companies. We also included a few longtime postdocs and research staff in biosciences to capture more details of experimental decisions from which faculty members in those fields often were more removed. This definition of expert allows us to identify the practices of skilled professionals; we are not studying what makes only the most exceptional experts unique.

Experts were volunteers recruited through direct contact via the research team's personal and professional networks and referrals from experts in our networks. This recruitment method likely biased our sample toward people who experienced relatively similar training (most were trained in STEM disciplines at U.S. universities within the last 15–50 years). Within this limitation, we attempted to get a large range of experts by field and experience. This included people from 10 different fields (including molecular biology/biochemistry, ecology, and medicine), 11 U.S. universities, and nine different companies or government labs, and the sample was 33% female (though our engineering sample only included one female). The medical experts were volunteers from a select group of medical school faculty chosen to serve as clinical reasoning mentors for medical students at a prestigious university. We only contacted people who met our criteria for being an “expert,” and everyone who volunteered was included in the study. Most of the people who were contacted volunteered, and the only reason given for not volunteering was insufficient time. Other than their disciplinary expertise, there was little to distinguish these experts beyond the fact they were acquaintances with members of the team or acquaintances of acquaintances of team or project advisory board members. The precise number from each field was determined largely by availability of suitable experts.

We defined an “authentic problem” to be one that these experts solve in their actual jobs. Generally, this meant research projects for the science and engineering faculty, design problems for the industry engineers, and patient diagnoses for the medical doctors. Such problems are characterized by complexity, with many factors involved and no obvious solution process, and involve substantial time, effort, and resources. Such problems involve far more complexity and many more decisions, particularly decisions with limited information, than the typical problems used in previous problem-solving research or used with students in instructional settings.

Creating an Initial List of Problem-Solving Decisions

We first interviewed 22 experts ( Table 1 ), most of whom were faculty at a prestigious university, in which we asked them to discuss expertise and problem solving in their fields as it related to their own experiences. This usually resulted in their discussing examples of one or more problems they had solved. Based on the first seven interviews, plus reflections on personal experience from the research team and review of the literature on expert problem solving and teaching of scientific practices ( Ericsson et al. , 2006 ; NRC, 2012a ; Wieman, 2015 ), we created a generic list of decisions that were made in S&E problem solving. In the rest of the unstructured interviews (15), we also provided the experts with our list and asked them to comment on any additions or deletions they would suggest. Faculty who had close supervision of graduate students and industry experts who had extensively supervised inexperienced staff were particularly informative. Their observations of the way inexperienced people could fail made them sensitive to the different elements of expertise and where incorrect decisions could be made. Although we initially expected to find substantial differences across disciplines, from early in the process, we noted a high degree of overlap across the interviews in the decisions that were described.

URM (under-represented minority) included 3 African American and 2 Hispanic/Latinx. One medical faculty member was interviewed twice – in both informal and structure interviews, for a total of 53 interviews with 52 experts.

Refinement and Validation of the List of Decisions

After creating the preliminary list of decisions from the informal interviews, we conducted a separate set of more structured interviews to test and refine the list. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 31 experts from across science, engineering, and medical fields ( Table 1 ). For these interviews, we recruited experts from a range of universities and companies, though the range of institutions is still limited, given the sample size. Interviews were conducted in person or over video chat and were transcribed for analysis. In the semistructured interviews, experts were asked to choose a problem or two from their work that they could recall the details of solving and then describe the process, including all the steps and decisions they made. So that we could get a full picture of the successful problem-solving process, we decided to focus the interviews on problems that they had eventually solved successfully, though their processes inherently involved paths that needed to be revised and reconsidered. Transcripts from interviewees who agreed to have their interview transcript published are available in the supplemental data set.

Our interview protocol (see Supplemental Text) was inspired in part by the critical decision method of cognitive task analysis ( Crandall et al. , 2006 ; Lintern et al. , 2018 ), which was created for research in cognitive systems engineering and naturalistic decision making. There are some notable differences between our work and theirs, both in research goal and method. First, their goal is to improve training in specific fields by focusing on how critical decisions are made in that field during an unusual or important event; the analysis seeks to identify factors involved in making those critical decisions. We are focusing on the overall problem solving and how it compares across many different fields, which quickly led to attention on what decisions are to be made, rather than how a limited set of those decisions are made. We asked experts to describe a specific, but not necessarily unusual, problem in their work, and focused our analysis on identifying all decisions made, not reasons for making them or identifying which were most critical. The specific order of problem-solving steps was also less important to us, in part because it was clear that there was no consistent order that was followed. Second, we are looking at different types of work. Cognitive systems engineering work has primarily focused on performance in professions like firefighters, power plant operators, military technicians, and nurses. These tend to require time-sensitive critical skills that are taught with modest amounts of formal training. We are studying scientists, engineers, and doctors solving problems that require much longer and less time-critical solutions and for which the formal training occupies many years.

Given our different focus, we made several adaptations to eliminate some of the more time-consuming steps from the interview protocol, allowing us to limit the interview time to approximately 1 hour. Both protocols seek to elicit an accurate and complete reporting of the steps taken and decisions made in the process of solving a problem. Our general strategy was: 1) Have the expert explain the problem and talk step by step through the decisions involved in solving it, with relatively few interruptions from the interviewer except to keep the discussion focused on the specific problem and occasionally to ask for clarifications. 2) Ask follow-up questions to probe for more detail about particular steps and aspects of the problem-solving process. 3) Occasionally ask for general thoughts on how a novice's process might differ.

While some have questioned the reliability of information from retrospective interviews ( Nisbett and Wilson, 1977 ), we believe we avoid these concerns, because we are only identifying a decision to be made, which in this case, means identifying a well-defined action that was chosen from alternatives. This is less subjective and much more likely to be accurately recalled than is the rationale behind such a decision. See Ericsson and Simon (1980) . However, the decisions identified may still be somewhat limited—the process of deciding among possible actions might involve additional decisions in the moment, when the solution is still unknown, that we are unable to capture in the retrospective context. For the decisions we can identify, we are able to check their accuracy and completeness by comparing them with the actions taken in the conduct of the research/design. For example, consider this quote from a physician who had to re-evaluate a diagnosis, “And, in my very subjective sense, he seemed like he was being forthcoming and honest. Granted people can fool you, but he seemed like he was being forthcoming. So we had to reevaluate.” The physician then considered alternative diagnoses that could explain a test result that at first had indicated an incorrect diagnosis. While this quote does describe the (retrospective) reasoning behind a decision, we do not need to know whether that reasoning is accurately recalled. We can simply code this as “decision 18, how believable is info?” The physician followed up by considering alternative diagnoses, which in this context was coded as “26, how good is solution?” and “8, potential solutions?” This was followed by the description of the literature and additional tests conducted. These indicated actions taken that confirm the physician made a decision about the reliability of the information given by the patient.

Interview Coding

We coded the semistructured interviews in terms of decisions made, through iterative rounds of coding ( Chi, 1997 ), following a “directed content analysis approach,” which involves coding according to predefined theoretical categories and updating the codes as needed based on the data ( Hsieh and Shannon, 2005 ). Our predefined categories were the list of decisions we had developed during the informal interviews. This approach means that we limited the focus of our qualitative analysis—we were able to test and refine the list of decisions, but we did not seek to identify all possible categories of approach to selecting and solving problems. The goals of each iterative round of coding are described in the next three paragraphs. To code for decisions in general, we matched decisions from the list to statements in each interview, based on the following criteria: 1) there was an explicit statement of a decision or choice made or needing to be made; 2) there was the description of the outcome of a decision, such as listing important features of the problem (that had been decided on) or conclusions arrived at; or 3) there was a statement of actions taken that indicated a decision about the appropriate action had been made, usually from a set of alternatives. Two examples illustrate the types of comments we identified as decisions: A molecular biologist explicitly stated the decisions required to decompose a problem into subproblems (decision 11), “Which cell do we use? The gene. Which gene do we edit? Which part of that gene do we edit? How do we build the enzyme that is going to do the cutting? … And how do we read out that it worked?” An ecologist made a statement that was also coded as a decomposition decision, because it described the action taken: “So I analyze the bird data first on its own, rather than trying to smash all the taxonomic groups together because they seem really apples and oranges. And just did two kinds of analysis, one was just sort of across all of these cases, around the world.” A single statement could be coded as multiple decisions if they were occurring simultaneously in the story being recalled or were intimately interconnected in the context of that interview, as with the ecology quote, in which the last sentence leads into deciding what data analysis is needed. Inherent in nearly every one of these decisions was that there was insufficient information to know the answer with certainty, so judgment was required.

Our primary goal for the first iterative round of coding was to check whether our list was complete by checking for any decisions that were missing, as indicated by either an action taken or a stated decision that was not clearly connected to a decision on our initial list. In this round, we also clarified wording and combined decisions that we were consistently unable to differentiate during the coding. A sample of three interviews (from biology, medicine, and electrical engineering) were first coded independently by four coders (AP, EB, CK, and AF), then discussed. The decision list was modified to add decisions and update wording based on that discussion. Then the interviews were recoded with the new list and rediscussed, leading to more refinements to the list. Two additional interviews (from physics and chemical engineering) were then coded by three coders (AP, EB, and CK) and further similar refinements were made. Throughout the subsequent rounds of coding, we continued to check for missing decisions, but after the additions and adjustments made based on these five interviews, we did not identify any more missing decisions.

In our next round of coding, we focused on condensing overlapping decisions and refining wording to improve the clarity of descriptions as they applied across different disciplinary contexts and to ensure consistent interpretation by different coders. Two or three coders independently coded an additional 11 interviews, iteratively meeting to discuss codes identified in the interviews, refining wording and condensing the list to improve agreement and combine overlapping codes, and then using the updated list to code subsequent interviews. We condensed the list by combining decisions that represented the same cognitive process taking place at different times, that were discipline-specific variations on the same decision, or that were substeps involved in making a larger decision. We noticed that some decisions were frequently co-coded with others, particularly in some disciplines. But if they were identified as distinct a reasonable fraction of the time in any discipline, we listed them as separate. This provided us with a list, condensed from 42 to 29 discrete decisions (plus five additional non-decision themes that were so prevalent that they are important to describe), that gave good consistency between coders.

Finally, we used the resulting codes to tabulate which decisions occurred in each interview, simplifying our coding process to focus on deciding whether or not each decision had occurred, with an example if it did occur to back up the “yes” code, but no longer attempting to capture every time each decision was mentioned. Individual coders identified decisions mentioned in the remaining 15 interviews. Interviews that had been coded with the early versions of the list were also recoded to ensure consistency. Coders flagged any decisions they were unsure about occurring in a particular interview, and two to four coders (AP, EB, CK, and CW) met to discuss those debated codes, with most uncertainties being resolved by explanations from a team member who had more technical expertise in the field of the interview. Minor wording changes were made during this process to ensure that each description of a decision captured all instantiations of the decision across disciplines, but no significant changes to the list were needed or made.

Coding an interview in terms of decisions made and actions taken in the research often required a high level of expertise in the discipline in question. The coder had to be familiar with the conduct of research in the field in order to recognize which actions corresponded to a decision between alternatives, but our team was assembled with this requirement in mind. It included high-level expertise across five different fields of science, engineering, and medicine and substantial familiarity with several other fields.

Supplemental Table S1 shows the final tabulation of decisions identified in each interview. In the tabulation, most decisions were marked as either “yes” or “no” for each interview, though 65 out of 1054 total were marked as “implied,” for one of the following reasons: 1) for 40/65, based on the coder's knowledge of the field, it was clear that a step must have been taken to achieve an outcome or action, even though that decision was not explicitly mentioned (e.g., interviewees describe collecting certain raw data and then coming to a specific conclusion, so they must have decided how to analyze the data, even if they did not mention the analysis explicitly); 2) for 15/65, the interview context was important, in that multiple statements from different parts of the interview taken together were sufficient to conclude that the decision must have happened, though no single statement described that decision explicitly; 3) 10/65 involved a decision that was explicitly discussed as an important step in problem solving, but they did not directly state how it was related to the problem at hand, or it was stated only in response to a direct prompt from the interviewer. The proportion of decisions identified in each interview, broken down by either explicit or explicit + implied, is presented in Supplemental Tables S1 and S2. Table 2 and Figure 2 of the main text show explicit + implied decision numbers.

a See supplementary text and Table S2 for full description and examples of each decision. A set of other non-decision knowledge and skill development themes were also frequently mentioned as important to professional success: Staying up to date in the field (84%), intuition and experience (77%), interpersonal and teamwork (100%), efficiency (32%), and attitude (68%).

b Percentage of interviews in which category or decision was mentioned.

c Numbering is for reference. In practice ordering is fluid – involves extensive iteration with other possible starting points.

d Chosen predictive framework(s) will inform all other decisions.

e Reflection occurs throughout process, and often leads to iteration. Reflection on solution occurs at the end as well.

FIGURE 2. Proportion of decisions coded in interviews by field. This tabulation includes decisions 1–29, not the additional themes. Error bars represent standard deviations. Number of interviews: total = 31; physical science = 9; biological science = 8; engineering = 8; medicine = 6. Compared with the sciences, slightly fewer decisions overall were identified in the coding of engineering and medicine interviews, largely for discipline-specific reasons. See Supplemental Table S2 and associated discussion.

Two of the interviews that had not been discussed during earlier rounds of coding (one physics [AP and EB], one medicine [AP and CK]) were independently coded by two coders to check interrater reliability using the final list of decisions. The goal of our final coding was to tabulate whether or not each expert described making each decision at any point in the problem-solving process, so the level of detail we chose for coding and interrater reliability was whether or not a decision was present in the entire interview. The decisions identified in each interview were compared for the two coders. For both interviews, the raters disagreed on whether or not only one of the 29 decisions occurred. Codes of “implied” were counted as agreement if the other coder selected either “yes” or “implied.” This equates to a percent agreement of 97% for each interview (28 agree/29 total decisions per interview = 97%). As a side note, there was also one disagreement per interview on the coding of the five other themes, but those themes were not a focus of this work nor the interviews.

We identified a total set of 29 decisions to be made (plus five other themes), all of which were identified in a large fraction of the interviews across all disciplines ( Table 2 and Figure 2 ). There was a surprising degree of overlap across the different fields with all the experts mentioning similar decisions to be made. All 29 were evident by the fifth semistructured interview, and on average, each interview revealed 85% of the 29 decisions. Many decisions occurred multiple times in an interview, with the number of times varying widely, depending on the length and complexity of the problem-solving process discussed.

We focused our analysis on what decisions needed to be made, not on the experts’ processes for making those decisions: noting that a choice happened, not how they selected and chose among different alternatives. This is because, while the decisions to be made were the same across disciplines, how the experts made those decisions varied greatly by discipline and individual. The process of making the decisions relied on specialized disciplinary knowledge and experience and may vary depending on demographics or other factors that our study design (both our sample and nature of retrospective interviews) did not allow us to investigate. However, while that knowledge was distinct and specialized, we could tell that it was consistently organized according to a common structure we call a “predictive framework,” as discussed in the “ Predictive Framework ” section below. Also, while every “decision” reflected a step in the problem solving involved in the work, and the expert being interviewed was involved in making or approving the decision, that does not mean the decision process was carried out only by that individual. In many cases, the experts described the decisions made in terms of ideas and results of their teams, and the importance of interpersonal skills and teamwork was an important non-decision theme raised in all interviews.

We were particularly concerned with the correctness and completeness of the set of decisions. Although the correctness was largely established by the statements in the interviews, we also showed the list of decisions to these experts at the end of the interviews as well as to about a dozen other experts. In all cases, they all agreed that these decisions were ones they and others in their field made when solving problems. The completeness of the list of decisions was confirmed by: 1) looking carefully at all specific actions taken in the described problem-solving process and checking that each action matched a corresponding decision from the list; and 2) the high degree of consistency in the set of decisions across all the interviews and disciplines. This implies that it is unlikely that there are important decisions that we are missing, because that would require any such missing decisions to be consistently unspoken by all 31 interviewees as well as consistently unrecognized by us from the actions that were taken in the problem-solving process.

In focusing on experts’ recollections of their successful solving of problems, our study design may have missed decisions that experts only made during failed problem-solving attempts. However, almost all interviews described solution paths that were not smooth and continuous, but rather involved going down numerous dead ends. There were approaches that were tried and failed, data that turned out to be ambiguous and worthless, and so on. Identifying the failed path involved reflection decisions (23–26). Often decision 9 (is problem solvable?) would be mentioned, because it described a path that was determined to be not solvable. For example, a biologist explained, “And then I ended up just switching to a different strain that did it [crawling off the plate] less. Because it was just … hard to really get them to behave themselves. I suppose if I really needed to rely on that very particular one, I probably would have exhausted the possibilities a bit more.” Thus, we expect unsuccessful problem solving would entail a smaller subset of decisions being made, particularly lack of reflection decisions, or poor choices on the decisions, rather than making a different set of decisions.

The set of decisions represent a remarkably consistent structure underlying S&E problem solving. For the purposes of presentation, we have categorized the decisions as shown in Figure 3 , roughly based on the purposes they achieve. However, the process is far less orderly and sequential than implied by this diagram, or in fact any characterization of an orderly “scientific method.” We were struck by how variable the sequence of decisions was in the descriptions provided. For example, experts who described how they began work on a problem sometimes discussed importance and goals (1–3, what is important in field?; opportunity fits solver’s expertise?; and goals, criteria, constraints?), but others mentioned a curious observation (20, any significant anomalies?), important features of their system that led them to questions (4, important features and info?, 6, how to narrow down problem?), or other starting points. We also saw that there were flexible connections between decisions and repeated iterations—jumping back to the same type of decision multiple times in the solution process, often prompted by reflection as new information and insights were developed. The sequence and number of iterations described varied dramatically by interview, and we cannot determine to what extent this was due to legitimate differences in the problem-solving process or to how the expert recalled and chose to describe the process. This lack of a consistent starting point, with jumping and iterating between decisions, has also been identified in the naturalistic decision-making literature ( Mosier et al. , 2018 ). Finally, the experts also often described considering multiple decisions simultaneously. In some interviews, a few decisions were always described together, while in others, they were clearly separate decisions. In summary, while the specific decisions themselves are fully grounded in expert practice, the categories and order shown here are artificial simplifications for presentation purposes.

FIGURE 3. Representation of problem-solving decisions by categories. The black arrows represent a hypothetical but unrealistic order of operations, the blue arrows represent more realistic iteration paths. The decisions are grouped into categories for presentation purposes; numbers indicate the number of decisions in each category. Knowledge and skill development were commonly mentioned themes but are not decisions.

The decisions contained in the seven categories are summarized here. See Supplemental Table S2 for specific examples of each decision across multiple disciplines.

Category A. Selection and Goals of the Problem

This category involves deciding on the importance of the problem, what criteria a solution must meet, and how well it matches the capabilities, resources, and priorities of the expert. As an example, an earth scientist described the goal of her project (decision 3, goals, criteria, constraints?) to map and date the earliest volcanic rocks associated with what is now Yellowstone and explained why the project was a good fit for her group (2, opportunity fits solver’s expertise?) and her decision to pursue the project in light of the significance of this type of eruption in major extinction events (1, what is important in field?). In many cases, decisions related to framing (see category B) were mentioned before decisions in this category or were an integral part of the process for developing goals.

1. What is important in the field?

What are important questions or problems? Where is the field heading? Are there advances in the field that open new possibilities?

2. Opportunity fits solver's expertise?

If and where are there gaps/opportunities to solve in field? Given experts’ unique perspectives and capabilities, are there opportunities particularly accessible to them? (This could involve challenging the status quo, questioning assumptions in the field.)

3. Goals, criteria, constraints?

a. What are the goals, design criteria, or requirements of the problem or its solution?

b. What is the scope of the problem?

c. What constraints are there on the solution?

d. What will be the criteria on which the solution is evaluated?

Category B. Frame Problem

These decisions lead to a more concrete formulation of the solution process and potential solutions. This involves identifying the key features of the problem and deciding on predictive frameworks to use (see “ Predictive Framework ” section below), as well as narrowing down the problem, often forming specific questions or hypotheses. Many of these decisions are guided by past problem solutions with which the expert is familiar and sees as relevant. The framing decisions of a physician can be seen in his discussion of a patient with liver failure who had previously been diagnosed with HIV but had features (4, important features and info?; 5, what predictive framework?) that made the physician question the HIV diagnosis (5, what predictive framework?; 26, how good is solution?). His team then searched for possible diagnoses that could explain liver failure and lead to a false-positive HIV test (7, related problems?; 8, potential solutions?), which led to their hypothesis the patient might have Q fever (6, how to narrow down problem?; 13, what info needed?; 15, specific plan for getting info?). While each individual decision is strongly supported by the data, the categories are groupings for presentation purposes. In particular, framing (category B) and planning (see category C) decisions often blended together in interviews.

a. Which available information is relevant to problem solving and why?

b. (When appropriate) Create/find a suitable abstract representation of core ideas and information Examples: physics, equation representing process involved; chemistry, bond diagrams/potential energy surfaces; biology, diagram of pathway steps.

5. What predictive framework?

Which potential predictive frameworks to use? (Decide among possible predictive frameworks or create framework.) This includes deciding on the appropriate level of mechanism and structure that the framework needs to embody to be most useful for the problem at hand.

6. How to narrow down the problem?

How to narrow down the problem? Often involves formulating specific questions and hypotheses.

7. Related problems?

What are related problems or work seen before, and what aspects of their problem-solving process and solutions might be useful in the present context? (This may involve reviewing literature and/or reflecting on experience.)

8. Potential solutions?

What are potential solutions? (This is based on experience and fitting some criteria for solution they have for a problem having general key features identified.)

9. Is problem solvable?

Is the problem plausibly solvable and is the solution worth pursuing given the difficulties, constraints, risks, and uncertainties?

Category C. Plan the Process for Solving

These decisions establish the specifics needed to solve the problem and include: how to simplify the problem and decompose it into pieces, what specific information is needed, how to obtain that information, and what are the resources needed and priorities? Planning by an ecologist can be seen in her extensive discussion of her process of simplifying (10, approximations/simplifications to make?) a meta-analysis project about changes in migration behavior, which included deciding what types of data she needed (13, what info needed?), planning how to conduct her literature search (15, specific plan for getting info?), difficulties in analyzing the data (12, most difficult/uncertain areas?; 16, which calculations and data analysis?), and deciding to analyze different taxonomic groups separately (11, how to decompose into subproblems?). In general, decomposition often resulted in multiple iterations through the problem-solving decisions, as subsets of decisions need to be made about each decomposed aspect of a problem. Framing (category B) and planning (category C) decisions occupied much of the interviews, indicating their importance.

10. Approximations and simplifications to make?

What approximations or simplifications are appropriate? How to simplify the problem to make it easier to solve? Test possible simplifications/approximations against established criteria.

11. How to decompose into subproblems?

How to decompose the problem into more tractable subproblems? (Subproblems are independently solvable pieces with their own subgoals.)

12. Most difficult or uncertain areas?

a. What are acceptable levels of uncertainty with which to proceed at various stages?

13. What info needed?

a. What will be sufficient to test and distinguish between potential solutions?

14. Priorities?

What to prioritize among many competing considerations? What to do first and how to obtain necessary resources?

Considerations could include: What's most important? Most difficult? Addressing uncertainties? Easiest? Constraints (time, materials, etc.)? Cost? Optimization and trade-offs? Availability of resources? (facilities/materials, funding sources, personnel)

15. Specific plan for getting information?

a. What are the general requirements of a problem-solving approach, and what general approach will they pursue? (These decisions are often made early in the problem-solving process as part of framing.)

b. How to obtain needed information? Then carry out those plans. (This could involve many discipline- and problem-specific investigation possibilities such as: designing and conducting experiments, making observations, talking to experts, consulting the literature, doing calculations, building models, or using simulations.)

c. What are achievable milestones, and what are metrics for evaluating progress?

d. What are possible alternative outcomes and paths that may arise during the problem-solving process, both consistent with predictive framework and not, and what would be paths to follow for the different outcomes?

Category D. Interpret Information and Choose Solution(s)

This category includes deciding how to analyze, organize, and draw conclusions from available information, reacting to unexpected information, and deciding upon a solution. A biologist studying aging in worms described how she analyzed results from her experiments, which included representing her results in survival curves and conducting statistical analyses (16, which calculations and data analysis?; 17, how to represent and organize info?), as well as setting up blind experiments (15, specific plan for getting info?) so that she could make unbiased interpretations (18, how believable is info?) of whether a worm was alive or dead. She also described comparing results with predictions to justify the conclusion that worm aging was related to fertility (19, how does info compare to predictions?; 21, appropriate conclusions?; 22, what is best solution?). Deciding how results compared with expectations based on a predictive framework was a key decision that often preceded several other decisions.

16. Which calculations and data analysis?

What calculations and data analysis are needed? Once determined, these must then be carried out.

17. How to represent and organize information?

What is the best way to represent and organize available information to provide clarity and insights? (Usually this will involve specialized and technical representations related to key features of predictive framework.)

18. How believable is the information?

Is information valid, reliable, and believable (includes recognizing potential biases)?

19. How does information compare to predictions?

As new information comes in, particularly from experiments or calculations, how does it compare with expected results (based on the predictive framework)?

20. Any significant anomalies?

a. Does potential anomaly fit within acceptable range of predictive framework(s) (given limitations of predictive framework and underlying assumptions and approximations)?

b. Is potential anomaly an unusual statistical variation or relevant data? Is it within acceptable levels of uncertainty?

21. Appropriate conclusions?

What are appropriate conclusions based on the data? (This involves making conclusions and deciding if they are justified.)

22. What is the best solution?

a. Which of multiple candidate solutions are consistent with all available information and which can be rejected? (This could be based on comparing data with predicted results.)

b. What refinements need to be made to candidate solutions?

Category E. Reflect

Reflection decisions occur throughout the process and include deciding whether assumptions are justified, whether additional knowledge or information is needed, how well the solution approach is working, and whether potential and then final solutions are adequate. These decisions match the categories of reflection identified by Salehi (2018) . A mechanical engineer described developing a model (to inform surgical decisions) of which muscles allow the thumb to function in the most useful manner (22, what is best solution?), including reflecting on how well engineering approximations applied in the biological context (23, assumptions and simplifications appropriate?). He also described reflecting on his approach, that is, why he chose to use cadaveric models instead of mathematical models (25, how well is solving approach working?), and the limitations of his findings in that the “best” muscle identified was difficult to access surgically (26, how good is solution?; 27, broader implications?). Reflection decisions are made throughout the problem-solving process, often lead to reconsidering other decisions, and are critical for success.

23. Assumptions and simplifications appropriate?

a. Do the assumptions and simplifications made previously still look appropriate considering new information?

b Does predictive framework need to be modified?

24. Additional knowledge needed?

a. Is solver's relevant knowledge sufficient?

b. Is more information needed and, if so, what?

c. Does some information need to be checked? (Is there a need to repeat experiment or check a different source?)

25. How well is the problem-solving approach working?

How well is the problem-solving approach working, and does it need to be modified? This includes possibly modifying the goals. (One needs to reflect on one's strategy by evaluating progress toward the solution.) and reflecting on one’s strategy by evaluating progress toward the solution.

26. How good is the solution?

a. Decide by exploring possible failure modes and limitations—“try to break” solution.

b. Does it “make sense” and pass discipline-specific tests for solutions of this type of problem?

c. Does it completely meet the goals/criteria?

Category F. Implications and Communication of Results

These are decisions about the broader implications of the work, and how to communicate results most effectively. For example, a theoretical physicist developing a method to calculate the magnetic moment of the muon decided on who would be interested in his work (28, audience for communication?) and what would be the best way to present it (29, best way to present work?). He also discussed the implications of preliminary work on a simplified aspect of the problem (10, approximations and simplifications to make?) in terms of evaluating its impact on the scientific community and deciding on next steps (27, broader implications?; 29, best way to present work?). Many interviewees described that making decisions in this category affected their decisions in other categories.

27. Broader implications?

What are the broader implications of the results, including over what range of contexts does the solution apply? What outstanding problems in the field might it solve? What novel predictions can it enable? How and why might this be seen as interesting to a broader community?

28. Audience for communication?

What is the audience for communication of work, and what are their important characteristics?

29. Best way to present work?

What is the best way to present the work to have it understood, and its correctness and importance appreciated? How to make a compelling story of the work?

Category G. Ongoing Skill and Knowledge Development

Although we focused on decisions in the problem-solving process, the experts volunteered general skills and knowledge they saw as important elements of problem-solving expertise in their fields. These included teamwork and interpersonal skills (strongly emphasized), acquiring experience and intuition, and keeping abreast of new developments in their fields.

30. Stay up to date in field

a. Reviewing literature, which does involve making decisions as to which is important.

b. Learning relevant new knowledge (ideas and technology from literature, conferences, colleagues, etc.)

31. Intuition and experience

Acquiring experience and associated intuition to improve problem solving.

32. Interpersonal, teamwork

Includes navigating collaborations, team management, patient interactions, communication skills, etc., particularly as how these apply in the context of the various types of problem-solving processes.

33. Efficiency

Time management including learning to complete certain common tasks efficiently and accurately.

34. Attitude

Motivation and attitude toward the task. Factors such as interest, perseverance, dealing with stress, and confidence in decisions.

Predictive Framework

How the decisions were made was highly dependent on the discipline and problem. However, there was one element that was fundamental and common across all interviews: the early adoption of a “predictive framework” that the experts used throughout the problem-solving process. We define this framework as “a mental model of key features of the problem and the relationships between the features.” All the predictive frameworks involved some degree of simplification and approximation and an underlying level of mechanism that established the relationships between key features. The frameworks provided a structure of knowledge and facilitated the application of that knowledge to the problem at hand, allowing experts to repeatedly run “mental simulations” to make predictions for dependencies and observables and to interpret new information.

As an example, an ecologist described her predictive framework for migration, which incorporated important features such as environmental conditions and genetic differences between species and the mechanisms by which these interacted to impact the migration patterns for a species. She used this framework to guide her meta-analysis of changes in migration patterns, affecting everything from her choice of data sets to include to her interpretation of why migration patterns changed for different species. In many interviews, the frameworks used evolved as additional information was obtained, with additional features being added or underlying assumptions modified. For some problems, the relevant framework was well established and used with confidence, while for other problems, there was considerable uncertainty as to a suitable framework, so developing and testing the framework was a substantial part of the solution process.

A predictive framework contains the expert knowledge organization that has been observed in previous studies of expertise ( Egan and Greeno, 1974 ) but goes further, as here it serves as an explicit tool that guides most decisions and actions during the solving of complex problems. Mental models and mental simulations that are described in the naturalistic decision-making literature are similar, in that they are used to understand the problem and guide decisions ( Klein, 2008 ; Mosier et al. , 2018 ), but they do not necessarily contain the same level of mechanistic understanding of relationships that underlies the predictive frameworks used in science and engineering problem solving. While the use of predictive frameworks was universal, the individual frameworks themselves explicitly reflected the relevant specialized knowledge, structure, and standards of the discipline, and arguably largely define a discipline ( Wieman, 2019 ).

Discipline-Specific Variation

While the set of decisions to be made was highly consistent across disciplines, there were extensive differences within and across disciplines and work contexts, which reflected the differences in perspectives and experiences. These differences were usually evident in how experts made each of the specific decisions, but not in the choice of which decisions needed to be made. In other words, the solution methods, which included following standard accepted procedures in each field, were very different. For example, planning in some experimental sciences may involve formulating a multiyear construction and data-collection effort, while in medicine it may be deciding on a simple blood test. Some decisions, notably in categories A, D, and F, were less likely to be mentioned in particular disciplines, because of the nature of the problems. Specifically, decisions 1 (what is important in field?), 2 (opportunity fits solver’s expertise?), 27 (broader implications?), 28 (audience for communication?), and 29 (best way to present work?) were dependent on the scope of the problem being described and the expert's specific role in it. These were mentioned less frequently in interviews where the problem was assigned to the expert (most often engineering or industry) or where the importance or audience was implicit (most often in medicine). Decisions 16 (which calculations and data analysis?) and 17 (how to represent and organize info?) were particularly unlikely to be mentioned in medicine, because test results are typically provided to doctors not in the form or raw data, but rather already analyzed by a lab or other medical technology professional, so the doctors we interviewed did not need to make decisions themselves about how to analyze or represent the data. Qualitatively, we also noticed some differences between disciplines in the patterns of connections between decisions. When the problem involved development of a tool or product, most commonly the case in engineering, the interview indicated relatively rapid cycles between goals (3), framing problem/potential solutions (8), and reflection on the potential solution (26), before going through the other decisions. Biology, the experimental science most represented in our interviews, had strong links between planning (15), deciding on appropriate conclusions (21), and reflection on the solution (26). This is likely because the respective problems involved complex systems with many unknowns, so careful planning was unusually important for achieving definitive conclusions. See Supplemental Text and Supplemental Table S2 for additional notes on decisions that were mentioned at lower frequency and decisions that were likely to be interconnected, regardless of field.

This work has created a framework of decisions to characterize problem solving in science and engineering. This framework is empirically based and captures the successful problem-solving process of all experts interviewed. We see that several dozen experts across many different fields all make a common set of decisions when solving authentic problems. There are flexible linkages between decisions that are guided by reflection in a continually evolving process. We have also identified the nature of the “predictive frameworks” that S&E experts consistently use in problem solving. These predictive frameworks reveal how these experts organize their disciplinary knowledge to facilitate making decisions. Many of the decisions we identified are reflected in previous work on expertise and scientific problem solving. This is particularly true for those listed in the planning and interpreting information categories ( Egan and Greeno, 1974 ). The priority experts give to framing and planning decisions over execution compared with novices has been noted repeatedly (e.g., Chi et al. , 1988 ). Expert reflection has been discussed, but less extensively ( Chase and Simon, 1973 ), and elements of the selection and implications and communication categories have been included in policy and standards reports (e.g., AAAS, 2011 ). Thus, our framework of decisions is consistent with previous work on scientific practices and expertise, but it is more complete, specific, empirically based, and generalizable across S&E disciplines.

A limitation of this study is the small number of experts we have in total, from each discipline, and from underrepresented groups (especially lack of female representation in engineering). The lack of randomized selection of participants may also bias the sample toward experts who experienced similar academic training (STEM disciplines at U.S. universities). This means we cannot prove that there are not some experts who follow other paths in problem solving. As with any scientific model, the framework described here should be subjected to further tests and modifications as necessary. However, to our knowledge, this is a far larger sample than used in any previous study of expert problem solving. Although we see a large amount of variation both within and across disciplines in the problem-solving process, this is reflected in how experts make decisions, not in what decisions they make. The very high degree of consistency in the decisions made across the entire sample strongly suggests that we are capturing elements that are common to all experts across science and engineering. A second limitation is that decisions often overlap and co-occur in an interview, so the division between decision items is often somewhat ambiguous and could be defined somewhat differently. As noted, a number of these decisions can be interconnected, and in some fields are nearly always interconnected.

The set of decisions we have observed provides a general framework for characterizing, analyzing, and teaching S&E problem solving. These decisions likely define much of the set of cognitive skills a student needs to practice and master to perform as a skilled practitioner in S&E. This framework of decisions provides a detailed and structured way to approach the teaching and measurement of problem solving at the undergraduate, graduate, and professional training levels. For teaching, we propose using the process of “deliberate practice” ( Ericsson, 2018 ) to help students learn problem solving. Deliberate practice of problem solving would involve effective scaffolding and concentrated practice, with feedback, at making the specific decisions identified here in relevant contexts. In a course, this would likely involve only an appropriately selected set of the decisions, but a good research mentor would ensure that trainees have opportunities to practice and receive feedback on their performance on each of these 29 decisions. Future work is needed to determine whether there are additional decisions that were not identified in experts but are productive components of student problem solving and should also be practiced. Measurements of individual problem-solving expertise based on our decision list and the associated discipline-specific predictive frameworks will allow a detailed measure of an individual's discipline-specific problem-solving strengths and weaknesses relative to an established expert. This can be used to provide targeted feedback to the learner, and when aggregated across students in a program, feedback on the educational quality of the program. We are currently working on the implementation of these ideas in a variety of instructional settings and will report on that work in future publications.

As discussed in the Introduction , typical science and engineering problems fail to engage students in the complete problem-solving process. By considering which of the 29 decisions are required to answer the problem, we can more clearly articulate why. The biology problem, for example, requires students to decide on a predictive framework and access the necessary content knowledge, and they need to decide which information they need to answer the problem. However, other decisions are not required or are already made for them, such as deciding on important features and identifying anomalies. We propose that different problems, designed specifically to require students to make sets of the problem-solving decisions from our framework, will provide more effective tools for measuring, practicing, and ultimately mastering the full S&E problem-solving process.

Our preliminary work with the use of such decision-based problems for assessing problem-solving expertise is showing great promise. For several different disciplines, we have given test subjects a relevant context, requiring content knowledge covered in courses they have taken, and asked them to make decisions from the list presented here. Skilled practitioners in the relevant discipline respond in very consistent ways, while students respond very differently and show large differences that typically correlate with their different educational experiences. What apparently matters is not what content they have seen, but rather what decisions they have had practice making. Our approach was to identify the decisions made by experts, this being the task that educators want students to master. Our data do not exclude the possibility that students engage in and/or should learn other decisions as a productive part of the problem-solving process while they are learning. Future work would seek to identify decisions made at intermediate levels during the development of expertise, to identify potential learning progressions that could be used to teach problem solving more efficiently. What we have seen is consistent with previous work identifying expert–novice differences but provides a much more extensive and detailed picture of a student's strengths and weaknesses and the impacts of particular educational experiences. We have also carried out preliminary development of courses that explicitly involve students making and justifying many of these decisions in relevant contexts, followed by feedback on their decisions. Preliminary results from these courses are also encouraging. Future work will involve the more extensive development and application of decision-based measurement and teaching of problem solving.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We acknowledge the many experts who agreed to be interviewed for this work, M. Flynn for contributions on expertise in mechanical engineering, and Shima Salehi for useful discussions. This work was funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute through an HHMI Professor grant to C.E.W.

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problem solving definition in science

Submitted: 2 December 2020 Revised: 11 June 2021 Accepted: 23 June 2021

© 2021 A. M. Price et al. CBE—Life Sciences Education © 2021 The American Society for Cell Biology. This article is distributed by The American Society for Cell Biology under license from the author(s). It is available to the public under an Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0).

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The Process of Problem Solving

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problem solving definition in science

In a 2013 article published in the Journal of Cognitive Psychology , Ngar Yin Louis Lee (Chinese University of Hong Kong) and APS William James Fellow Philip N. Johnson-Laird (Princeton University) examined the ways people develop strategies to solve related problems. In a series of three experiments, the researchers asked participants to solve series of matchstick problems.

In matchstick problems, participants are presented with an array of joined squares. Each square in the array is comprised of separate pieces. Participants are asked to remove a certain number of pieces from the array while still maintaining a specific number of intact squares. Matchstick problems are considered to be fairly sophisticated, as there is generally more than one solution, several different tactics can be used to complete the task, and the types of tactics that are appropriate can change depending on the configuration of the array.

Louis Lee and Johnson-Laird began by examining what influences the tactics people use when they are first confronted with the matchstick problem. They found that initial problem-solving tactics were constrained by perceptual features of the array, with participants solving symmetrical problems and problems with salient solutions faster. Participants frequently used tactics that involved symmetry and salience even when other solutions that did not involve these features existed.

To examine how problem solving develops over time, the researchers had participants solve a series of matchstick problems while verbalizing their problem-solving thought process. The findings from this second experiment showed that people tend to go through two different stages when solving a series of problems.

People begin their problem-solving process in a generative manner during which they explore various tactics — some successful and some not. Then they use their experience to narrow down their choices of tactics, focusing on those that are the most successful. The point at which people begin to rely on this newfound tactical knowledge to create their strategic moves indicates a shift into a more evaluative stage of problem solving.

In the third and last experiment, participants completed a set of matchstick problems that could be solved using similar tactics and then solved several problems that required the use of novel tactics.  The researchers found that participants often had trouble leaving their set of successful tactics behind and shifting to new strategies.

From the three studies, the researchers concluded that when people tackle a problem, their initial moves may be constrained by perceptual components of the problem. As they try out different tactics, they hone in and settle on the ones that are most efficient; however, this deduced knowledge can in turn come to constrain players’ generation of moves — something that can make it difficult to switch to new tactics when required.

These findings help expand our understanding of the role of reasoning and deduction in problem solving and of the processes involved in the shift from less to more effective problem-solving strategies.

Reference Louis Lee, N. Y., Johnson-Laird, P. N. (2013). Strategic changes in problem solving. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 25 , 165–173. doi: 10.1080/20445911.2012.719021

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problem solving definition in science

Careers Up Close: Joel Anderson on Gender and Sexual Prejudices, the Freedoms of Academic Research, and the Importance of Collaboration

Joel Anderson, a senior research fellow at both Australian Catholic University and La Trobe University, researches group processes, with a specific interest on prejudice, stigma, and stereotypes.

problem solving definition in science

Experimental Methods Are Not Neutral Tools

Ana Sofia Morais and Ralph Hertwig explain how experimental psychologists have painted too negative a picture of human rationality, and how their pessimism is rooted in a seemingly mundane detail: methodological choices. 

APS Fellows Elected to SEP

In addition, an APS Rising Star receives the society’s Early Investigator Award.

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Chapter 6: Scientific Problem Solving

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Scientific Problem Solving Video

Science is a method to discover empirical truths and patterns. Roughly speaking, the scientific method consists of

1) Observing

2) Forming a hypothesis

3) Testing the hypothesis and

4) Interpreting the data to confirm or disconfirm the hypothesis.

The beauty of science is that any scientific claim can be tested if you have the proper knowledge and equipment.

You can also use the scientific method to solve everyday problems: 1) Observe and clearly define the problem, 2) Form a hypothesis, 3) Test it, and 4) Confirm the hypothesis... or disconfirm it and start over.

So, the next time you are cursing in traffic or emotionally reacting to a problem, take a few deep breaths and then use this rational and scientific approach. Slow down, observe, hypothesize, and test.

Explain how you would solve these problems using the four steps of the scientific process.

Example: The fire alarm is not working.

1) Observe/Define the problem: it does not beep when I push the button.

2) Hypothesis: it is caused by a dead battery.

3) Test: try a new battery.

4) Confirm/Disconfirm: the alarm now works. If it does not work, start over by testing another hypothesis like “it has a loose wire.”  

  • My car will not start.
  • My child is having problems reading.
  • I owe $20,000, but only make $10 an hour.
  • My boss is mean. I want him/her to stop using rude language towards me.
  • My significant other is lazy. I want him/her to help out more.

6-8. Identify three problems where you can apply the scientific method.

*Answers will vary.

Application and Value

Science is more of a process than a body of knowledge. In our daily lives, we often emotionally react and jump to quick solutions when faced with problems, but following the four steps of the scientific process can help us slow down and discover more intelligent solutions.

In your study of philosophy, you will explore deeper questions about science. For example, are there any forms of knowledge that are nonscientific? Can science tell us what we ought to do? Can logical and mathematical truths be proven in a scientific way? Does introspection give knowledge even though I cannot scientifically observe your introspective thoughts? Is science truly objective?  These are challenging questions that should help you discover the scope of science without diminishing its awesome power.

But the first step in answering these questions is knowing what science is, and this chapter clarifies its essence. Again, Science is not so much a body of knowledge as it is a method of observing, hypothesizing, and testing. This method is what all the sciences have in common.

Perhaps too science should involve falsifiability, which is a concept explored in the next chapter.

Return to Logic Home                            Next (Chapter 7, Falsifiability)

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Overview of the Problem-Solving Mental Process

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

problem solving definition in science

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problem solving definition in science

  • Identify the Problem
  • Define the Problem
  • Form a Strategy
  • Organize Information
  • Allocate Resources
  • Monitor Progress
  • Evaluate the Results

Frequently Asked Questions

Problem-solving is a mental process that involves discovering, analyzing, and solving problems. The ultimate goal of problem-solving is to overcome obstacles and find a solution that best resolves the issue.

The best strategy for solving a problem depends largely on the unique situation. In some cases, people are better off learning everything they can about the issue and then using factual knowledge to come up with a solution. In other instances, creativity and insight are the best options.

It is not necessary to follow problem-solving steps sequentially, It is common to skip steps or even go back through steps multiple times until the desired solution is reached.

In order to correctly solve a problem, it is often important to follow a series of steps. Researchers sometimes refer to this as the problem-solving cycle. While this cycle is portrayed sequentially, people rarely follow a rigid series of steps to find a solution.

The following steps include developing strategies and organizing knowledge.

1. Identifying the Problem

While it may seem like an obvious step, identifying the problem is not always as simple as it sounds. In some cases, people might mistakenly identify the wrong source of a problem, which will make attempts to solve it inefficient or even useless.

Some strategies that you might use to figure out the source of a problem include :

  • Asking questions about the problem
  • Breaking the problem down into smaller pieces
  • Looking at the problem from different perspectives
  • Conducting research to figure out what relationships exist between different variables

2. Defining the Problem

After the problem has been identified, it is important to fully define the problem so that it can be solved. You can define a problem by operationally defining each aspect of the problem and setting goals for what aspects of the problem you will address

At this point, you should focus on figuring out which aspects of the problems are facts and which are opinions. State the problem clearly and identify the scope of the solution.

3. Forming a Strategy

After the problem has been identified, it is time to start brainstorming potential solutions. This step usually involves generating as many ideas as possible without judging their quality. Once several possibilities have been generated, they can be evaluated and narrowed down.

The next step is to develop a strategy to solve the problem. The approach used will vary depending upon the situation and the individual's unique preferences. Common problem-solving strategies include heuristics and algorithms.

  • Heuristics are mental shortcuts that are often based on solutions that have worked in the past. They can work well if the problem is similar to something you have encountered before and are often the best choice if you need a fast solution.
  • Algorithms are step-by-step strategies that are guaranteed to produce a correct result. While this approach is great for accuracy, it can also consume time and resources.

Heuristics are often best used when time is of the essence, while algorithms are a better choice when a decision needs to be as accurate as possible.

4. Organizing Information

Before coming up with a solution, you need to first organize the available information. What do you know about the problem? What do you not know? The more information that is available the better prepared you will be to come up with an accurate solution.

When approaching a problem, it is important to make sure that you have all the data you need. Making a decision without adequate information can lead to biased or inaccurate results.

5. Allocating Resources

Of course, we don't always have unlimited money, time, and other resources to solve a problem. Before you begin to solve a problem, you need to determine how high priority it is.

If it is an important problem, it is probably worth allocating more resources to solving it. If, however, it is a fairly unimportant problem, then you do not want to spend too much of your available resources on coming up with a solution.

At this stage, it is important to consider all of the factors that might affect the problem at hand. This includes looking at the available resources, deadlines that need to be met, and any possible risks involved in each solution. After careful evaluation, a decision can be made about which solution to pursue.

6. Monitoring Progress

After selecting a problem-solving strategy, it is time to put the plan into action and see if it works. This step might involve trying out different solutions to see which one is the most effective.

It is also important to monitor the situation after implementing a solution to ensure that the problem has been solved and that no new problems have arisen as a result of the proposed solution.

Effective problem-solvers tend to monitor their progress as they work towards a solution. If they are not making good progress toward reaching their goal, they will reevaluate their approach or look for new strategies .

7. Evaluating the Results

After a solution has been reached, it is important to evaluate the results to determine if it is the best possible solution to the problem. This evaluation might be immediate, such as checking the results of a math problem to ensure the answer is correct, or it can be delayed, such as evaluating the success of a therapy program after several months of treatment.

Once a problem has been solved, it is important to take some time to reflect on the process that was used and evaluate the results. This will help you to improve your problem-solving skills and become more efficient at solving future problems.

A Word From Verywell​

It is important to remember that there are many different problem-solving processes with different steps, and this is just one example. Problem-solving in real-world situations requires a great deal of resourcefulness, flexibility, resilience, and continuous interaction with the environment.

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You can become a better problem solving by:

  • Practicing brainstorming and coming up with multiple potential solutions to problems
  • Being open-minded and considering all possible options before making a decision
  • Breaking down problems into smaller, more manageable pieces
  • Asking for help when needed
  • Researching different problem-solving techniques and trying out new ones
  • Learning from mistakes and using them as opportunities to grow

It's important to communicate openly and honestly with your partner about what's going on. Try to see things from their perspective as well as your own. Work together to find a resolution that works for both of you. Be willing to compromise and accept that there may not be a perfect solution.

Take breaks if things are getting too heated, and come back to the problem when you feel calm and collected. Don't try to fix every problem on your own—consider asking a therapist or counselor for help and insight.

If you've tried everything and there doesn't seem to be a way to fix the problem, you may have to learn to accept it. This can be difficult, but try to focus on the positive aspects of your life and remember that every situation is temporary. Don't dwell on what's going wrong—instead, think about what's going right. Find support by talking to friends or family. Seek professional help if you're having trouble coping.

Davidson JE, Sternberg RJ, editors.  The Psychology of Problem Solving .  Cambridge University Press; 2003. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511615771

Sarathy V. Real world problem-solving .  Front Hum Neurosci . 2018;12:261. Published 2018 Jun 26. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2018.00261

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Status.net

What is Problem Solving? (Steps, Techniques, Examples)

By Status.net Editorial Team on May 7, 2023 — 5 minutes to read

What Is Problem Solving?

Definition and importance.

Problem solving is the process of finding solutions to obstacles or challenges you encounter in your life or work. It is a crucial skill that allows you to tackle complex situations, adapt to changes, and overcome difficulties with ease. Mastering this ability will contribute to both your personal and professional growth, leading to more successful outcomes and better decision-making.

Problem-Solving Steps

The problem-solving process typically includes the following steps:

  • Identify the issue : Recognize the problem that needs to be solved.
  • Analyze the situation : Examine the issue in depth, gather all relevant information, and consider any limitations or constraints that may be present.
  • Generate potential solutions : Brainstorm a list of possible solutions to the issue, without immediately judging or evaluating them.
  • Evaluate options : Weigh the pros and cons of each potential solution, considering factors such as feasibility, effectiveness, and potential risks.
  • Select the best solution : Choose the option that best addresses the problem and aligns with your objectives.
  • Implement the solution : Put the selected solution into action and monitor the results to ensure it resolves the issue.
  • Review and learn : Reflect on the problem-solving process, identify any improvements or adjustments that can be made, and apply these learnings to future situations.

Defining the Problem

To start tackling a problem, first, identify and understand it. Analyzing the issue thoroughly helps to clarify its scope and nature. Ask questions to gather information and consider the problem from various angles. Some strategies to define the problem include:

  • Brainstorming with others
  • Asking the 5 Ws and 1 H (Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How)
  • Analyzing cause and effect
  • Creating a problem statement

Generating Solutions

Once the problem is clearly understood, brainstorm possible solutions. Think creatively and keep an open mind, as well as considering lessons from past experiences. Consider:

  • Creating a list of potential ideas to solve the problem
  • Grouping and categorizing similar solutions
  • Prioritizing potential solutions based on feasibility, cost, and resources required
  • Involving others to share diverse opinions and inputs

Evaluating and Selecting Solutions

Evaluate each potential solution, weighing its pros and cons. To facilitate decision-making, use techniques such as:

  • SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats)
  • Decision-making matrices
  • Pros and cons lists
  • Risk assessments

After evaluating, choose the most suitable solution based on effectiveness, cost, and time constraints.

Implementing and Monitoring the Solution

Implement the chosen solution and monitor its progress. Key actions include:

  • Communicating the solution to relevant parties
  • Setting timelines and milestones
  • Assigning tasks and responsibilities
  • Monitoring the solution and making adjustments as necessary
  • Evaluating the effectiveness of the solution after implementation

Utilize feedback from stakeholders and consider potential improvements. Remember that problem-solving is an ongoing process that can always be refined and enhanced.

Problem-Solving Techniques

During each step, you may find it helpful to utilize various problem-solving techniques, such as:

  • Brainstorming : A free-flowing, open-minded session where ideas are generated and listed without judgment, to encourage creativity and innovative thinking.
  • Root cause analysis : A method that explores the underlying causes of a problem to find the most effective solution rather than addressing superficial symptoms.
  • SWOT analysis : A tool used to evaluate the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats related to a problem or decision, providing a comprehensive view of the situation.
  • Mind mapping : A visual technique that uses diagrams to organize and connect ideas, helping to identify patterns, relationships, and possible solutions.

Brainstorming

When facing a problem, start by conducting a brainstorming session. Gather your team and encourage an open discussion where everyone contributes ideas, no matter how outlandish they may seem. This helps you:

  • Generate a diverse range of solutions
  • Encourage all team members to participate
  • Foster creative thinking

When brainstorming, remember to:

  • Reserve judgment until the session is over
  • Encourage wild ideas
  • Combine and improve upon ideas

Root Cause Analysis

For effective problem-solving, identifying the root cause of the issue at hand is crucial. Try these methods:

  • 5 Whys : Ask “why” five times to get to the underlying cause.
  • Fishbone Diagram : Create a diagram representing the problem and break it down into categories of potential causes.
  • Pareto Analysis : Determine the few most significant causes underlying the majority of problems.

SWOT Analysis

SWOT analysis helps you examine the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats related to your problem. To perform a SWOT analysis:

  • List your problem’s strengths, such as relevant resources or strong partnerships.
  • Identify its weaknesses, such as knowledge gaps or limited resources.
  • Explore opportunities, like trends or new technologies, that could help solve the problem.
  • Recognize potential threats, like competition or regulatory barriers.

SWOT analysis aids in understanding the internal and external factors affecting the problem, which can help guide your solution.

Mind Mapping

A mind map is a visual representation of your problem and potential solutions. It enables you to organize information in a structured and intuitive manner. To create a mind map:

  • Write the problem in the center of a blank page.
  • Draw branches from the central problem to related sub-problems or contributing factors.
  • Add more branches to represent potential solutions or further ideas.

Mind mapping allows you to visually see connections between ideas and promotes creativity in problem-solving.

Examples of Problem Solving in Various Contexts

In the business world, you might encounter problems related to finances, operations, or communication. Applying problem-solving skills in these situations could look like:

  • Identifying areas of improvement in your company’s financial performance and implementing cost-saving measures
  • Resolving internal conflicts among team members by listening and understanding different perspectives, then proposing and negotiating solutions
  • Streamlining a process for better productivity by removing redundancies, automating tasks, or re-allocating resources

In educational contexts, problem-solving can be seen in various aspects, such as:

  • Addressing a gap in students’ understanding by employing diverse teaching methods to cater to different learning styles
  • Developing a strategy for successful time management to balance academic responsibilities and extracurricular activities
  • Seeking resources and support to provide equal opportunities for learners with special needs or disabilities

Everyday life is full of challenges that require problem-solving skills. Some examples include:

  • Overcoming a personal obstacle, such as improving your fitness level, by establishing achievable goals, measuring progress, and adjusting your approach accordingly
  • Navigating a new environment or city by researching your surroundings, asking for directions, or using technology like GPS to guide you
  • Dealing with a sudden change, like a change in your work schedule, by assessing the situation, identifying potential impacts, and adapting your plans to accommodate the change.
  • How to Resolve Employee Conflict at Work [Steps, Tips, Examples]
  • How to Write Inspiring Core Values? 5 Steps with Examples
  • 30 Employee Feedback Examples (Positive & Negative)

problem solving definition in science

What Is Problem Solving?

You will often see beach clean-up drives being publicized in coastal cities. There are already dustbins available on the beaches,…

What Is Problem Solving?

You will often see beach clean-up drives being publicized in coastal cities. There are already dustbins available on the beaches, so why do people need to organize these drives? It’s evident that despite advertising and posting anti-littering messages, some of us don’t follow the rules.

Temporary food stalls and shops make it even more difficult to keep the beaches clean. Since people can’t ask the shopkeepers to relocate or prevent every single person from littering, the clean-up drive is needed.  This is an ideal example of problem-solving psychology in humans. ( 230-fifth.com ) So, what is problem-solving? Let’s find out.

What Is Problem-Solving?

At its simplest, the meaning of problem-solving is the process of defining a problem, determining its cause, and implementing a solution. The definition of problem-solving is rooted in the fact that as humans, we exert control over our environment through solutions. We move forward in life when we solve problems and make decisions. 

We can better define the problem-solving process through a series of important steps.

Identify The Problem: 

This step isn’t as simple as it sounds. Most times, we mistakenly identify the consequences of a problem rather than the problem itself. It’s important that we’re careful to identify the actual problem and not just its symptoms. 

Define The Problem: 

Once the problem has been identified correctly, you should define it. This step can help clarify what needs to be addressed and for what purpose.

Form A Strategy: 

Develop a strategy to solve your problem. Defining an approach will provide direction and clarity on the next steps. 

Organize The Information:  

Organizing information systematically will help you determine whether something is missing. The more information you have, the easier it’ll become for you to arrive at a solution.  

Allocate Resources:  

We may not always be armed with the necessary resources to solve a problem. Before you commit to implementing a solution for a problem, you should determine the availability of different resources—money, time and other costs.

Track Progress: 

The true meaning of problem-solving is to work towards an objective. If you measure your progress, you can evaluate whether you’re on track. You could revise your strategies if you don’t notice the desired level of progress. 

Evaluate The Results:  

After you spot a solution, evaluate the results to determine whether it’s the best possible solution. For example, you can evaluate the success of a fitness routine after several weeks of exercise.

Meaning Of Problem-Solving Skill

Now that we’ve established the definition of problem-solving psychology in humans, let’s look at how we utilize our problem-solving skills.  These skills help you determine the source of a problem and how to effectively determine the solution. Problem-solving skills aren’t innate and can be mastered over time. Here are some important skills that are beneficial for finding solutions.

Communication

Communication is a critical skill when you have to work in teams.  If you and your colleagues have to work on a project together, you’ll have to collaborate with each other. In case of differences of opinion, you should be able to listen attentively and respond respectfully in order to successfully arrive at a solution.

As a problem-solver, you need to be able to research and identify underlying causes. You should never treat a problem lightly. In-depth study is imperative because often people identify only the symptoms and not the actual problem.

Once you have researched and identified the factors causing a problem, start working towards developing solutions. Your analytical skills can help you differentiate between effective and ineffective solutions.

Decision-Making

You’ll have to make a decision after you’ve identified the source and methods of solving a problem. If you’ve done your research and applied your analytical skills effectively, it’ll become easier for you to take a call or a decision.

Organizations really value decisive problem-solvers. Harappa Education’s   Defining Problems course will guide you on the path to developing a problem-solving mindset. Learn how to identify the different types of problems using the Types of Problems framework. Additionally, the SMART framework, which is a five-point tool, will teach you to create specific and actionable objectives to address problem statements and arrive at solutions. 

Explore topics & skills such as Problem Solving Skills , PICK Chart , How to Solve Problems & Barriers to Problem Solving from our Harappa Diaries blog section and develop your skills.

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COMMENTS

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  2. Theory of Problem Solving

    1. Problem and its definition The human beings are in their lives every day confronted with the situations that are for them contradictory, containing obstructions that have to be overcome in order to achieve the aim, or the human beings experience various difficulties.

  3. Problem solving

    (Feb. 09, 2024) See all related content → problem solving, process involved in finding a solution to a problem. Many animals routinely solve problems of locomotion, food finding, and shelter through trial and error.

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  5. Problem-solving Definition & Meaning

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  6. Problems: Definition, Types, and Evidence

    The nature of human problem solving has been studied by psychologists over the past hundred years. Beginning with the early experimental work of the Gestalt psychologists in Germany, and continuing through the 1960s and early 1970s, research on problem solving typically operated with relatively simple laboratory problems, such as Duncker's famous "X-ray" problem and Ewert and Lambert's ...

  7. Problem Solving

    Problem solving is the process of articulating solutions to problems. Problems have two critical attributes. First, a problem is an unknown in some context. That is, there is a situation in which there is something that is unknown (the difference between a goal state and a current state). Those situations vary from algorithmic math problems to ...

  8. Identifying problems and solutions in scientific text

    Problem solving is generally regarded as the most important cognitive activity in everyday and professional contexts (Jonassen 2000 ). Many studies on formalising the cognitive process behind problem-solving exist, for instance (Chandrasekaran 1983 ).

  9. Teaching Creativity and Inventive Problem Solving in Science

    Abstract. Engaging learners in the excitement of science, helping them discover the value of evidence-based reasoning and higher-order cognitive skills, and teaching them to become creative problem solvers have long been goals of science education reformers. But the means to achieve these goals, especially methods to promote creative thinking ...

  10. STEM Problem Solving: Inquiry, Concepts, and Reasoning

    Balancing disciplinary knowledge and practical reasoning in problem solving is needed for meaningful learning. In STEM problem solving, science subject matter with associated practices often appears distant to learners due to its abstract nature. Consequently, learners experience difficulties making meaningful connections between science and their daily experiences. Applying Dewey's idea of ...

  11. What exactly do we mean by the term 'problem solving'?

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  12. What is Problem Solving? Steps, Process & Techniques

    Problem Solving What is Problem Solving?. Quality Glossary Definition: Problem solving Problem solving is the act of defining a problem; determining the cause of the problem; identifying, prioritizing, and selecting alternatives for a solution; and implementing a solution. The problem-solving process Problem solving resources Problem Solving Chart

  13. A Detailed Characterization of the Expert Problem-Solving Process in

    A primary goal of science and engineering (S&E) education is to produce good problem solvers, but how to best teach and measure the quality of problem solving remains unclear. The process is complex, multifaceted, and not fully characterized. Here, we present a detailed characterization of the S&E problem-solving process as a set of specific interlinked decisions. This framework of decisions ...

  14. Problem-Solving Strategies and Obstacles

    Problem-solving is a vital skill for coping with various challenges in life. This webpage explains the different strategies and obstacles that can affect how you solve problems, and offers tips on how to improve your problem-solving skills. Learn how to identify, analyze, and overcome problems with Verywell Mind.

  15. (PDF) Theory of Problem Solving

    Possessing problem-solving abilities makes a person more valuable to employers, giving them an edge in the job market. Dostál (2015) asserts that addressing issues with correct structure is a ...

  16. The Process of Problem Solving

    In a series of three experiments, the researchers asked participants to solve series of matchstick problems. In matchstick problems, participants are presented with an array of joined squares. Each square in the array is comprised of separate pieces. Participants are asked to remove a certain number of pieces from the array while still ...

  17. Chapter 6: Scientific Problem Solving

    Science is a method to discover empirical truths and patterns. Roughly speaking, the scientific method consists of 1) Observing 2) Forming a hypothesis 3) Testing the hypothesis and 4) Interpreting the data to confirm or disconfirm the hypothesis.

  18. The Problem-Solving Process

    Problem-solving is a mental process that involves discovering, analyzing, and solving problems. The ultimate goal of problem-solving is to overcome obstacles and find a solution that best resolves the issue. The best strategy for solving a problem depends largely on the unique situation. In some cases, people are better off learning everything ...

  19. What is Problem Solving? (Steps, Techniques, Examples)

    Problem solving is the process of finding solutions to obstacles or challenges you encounter in your life or work. It is a crucial skill that allows you to tackle complex situations, adapt to changes, and overcome difficulties with ease.

  20. What Are Problem-Solving Skills? Definition and Examples

    Problem-Solving Skills Definition Problem-solving skills are the ability to identify problems, brainstorm and analyze answers, and implement the best solutions.

  21. What is Problem Solving

    What Is Problem-Solving? At its simplest, the meaning of problem-solving is the process of defining a problem, determining its cause, and implementing a solution. The definition of problem-solving is rooted in the fact that as humans, we exert control over our environment through solutions.

  22. Science

    Science. Science refers to the formulation of causal theories and mathematical models based on statistical methods and disciplined experimentation. Disciplined experimentation refers to experimentation that incorporates the three Rs: repetition, randomisation, and regulation (i.e. control .) If data is obtained from some source that does not ...

  23. PDF An Introduction to Computer Science and Problem Solving

    Computer science is similar to mathematics in that both are used as a means of defining and solving some problem. In fact, computer-based applications often use mathematical models as a basis for the manner in which they solve the problem at hand. In mathematics, a solution is often expressed in terms of formulas and equations. In