Problem-Solving Skills

If there was a book I’d recommend to beginning teachers in STEM fields, it would hands down be Teaching and Learning STEM: A Practical Guide by Richard Felder and Rebecca Brent. If such a guide was available when I first started teaching, I would have made fewer mistakes and caused my students less grief. But even if you’re an experienced instructor, it’s still a great book. It was nice to read that many of my current practices are good ones (although I learned them through trial and error). There were also reminders of things I’d forgotten and things I should try out so I get better at teaching.

 

Today’s blog post is on Chapter 9, “Problem-Solving Skills”. There’s an excellent vignette at the beginning contrasting two students: one is methodical, practical, detail-oriented, good at lab, but not so comfortable with abstraction and mathematical models; the other is intuitive, quick, takes leaps (but can be careless and miss details), and very comfortable with abstraction and visualizing mathematical models in the mind’s eye. They are characterized as polar opposites for illustrative purposes; but the reminder (to me, the instructor) is that I need to ensure that my class helps both these archetypes.

 

The main question addressed by Felder & Brent: “What attributes distinguish problem-solving experts from novices? How can I help my students develop those attributes?” They provide a handy table as shown below. Let’s take each of these in turn.

 

Problem Classification. Experts see the deeper (and more abstract) features, novices can’t see pass the superficial ones. How can we help students? First, we should point out these structural aspects or attributes as we walk students through example problems. Get students to practice talking through these when they’re problem-solving; TAPPS could even be helpful here. Second, give students several problems with the same aspect (so they get practice see some variants) and then introduce a problem in which the first methodology fails but another works (so they see when something is not just a variant of the first approach).

 

Metacognition. Experts think about their own thought process while problem solving is taking place. The novice, on encountering a new problem, looks through the textbook or lecture notes, then picks one that seems ‘promising’ and attempts to barrel through using that particular method. How can we help students? Model metacognition. Think aloud while solving the problem. Show what happens when you run into trouble and work your way out of it. (Exam wrappers can also be helpful here.) Break down problems into manageable chunks. Get students to practice, perhaps using TAPPS.

 

Automaticity. Once you’re comfortable driving a car or riding a bike, you no longer need to focus on every single step that you carry out, which the novice has to do. How can we help students? Practice, practice, practice, is what I tell my students. That’s how one builds fluency. (If only I did so more myself when language-learning.) As an instructor we need to build in practice opportunities that are spaced out so that students practice recalling what’s important. Doing something just once and expecting students to “perform” on the exam is a fool’s errand. But be careful not to overload the students; they have other time commitments and other classes to attend to.

 

Self-efficacy. My PhD in chemistry didn’t teach me how to teach. But it did build self-efficacy because lots of things don’t work in research. It’s rare that the first thing I try works, and the fifth attempt might still fail. Many of my introductory chemistry students did “well” in high school and don’t know what it’s like to fail at something; some had a “bad” experience in high-school chemistry and arrive negatively predisposed. How can we help students? Provide some early wins on assignments; don’t start off with the most difficult thing imaginable to “set the standard” (for failure). Use a diverse suite of pedagogical strategies and mix-it-up in class so that you don’t favor abstract thinkers over ones who would struggle with these challenging concepts. Felder & Brent reminded me to “minimize speed as a factor in determining test grades” (I already use their rule-of-thumb in constructing exams, but my P-Chem exams are probably still too tight time-wise).

 

If you’re a new instructor, most of your brain space is devoted to trying to make sure you get the content “delivered” with as few errors as possible. But it’s worth paying attention to the aspects of teaching that Felder & Brent discuss. Learning STEM is like learning a foreign language, and it requires scaffolding and support for a student to learn problem-solving skills and progress (at least partially) from novice to expert. Much of chemical theory is abstract – we can’t see atoms and molecules, the fundamental building blocks of the discipline! I constantly need to remind myself of the curse of knowledge, that I’ve forgotten what it is like to struggle through learning how to think like a chemist. Mayhap I can help my students get over the barrier with less of a struggle.