Problem Solving – A Teachable Skill

The goal of all instruction is to develop skills, knowledge, and abilities that transfer to tasks that a student can understand. However, we must take care when we teach students "how to think.” We should not teach students "what to think" or "what to do" in every instance because this emphasis is on procedural knowledge and not about problem solving.

Many of today’s textbooks show problem solving as a linear process and present problem solving as a series of steps, which leads to an emphasis on only getting the correct answer. In order to develop good problem solving abilities, students need to experience the frustration and excitement of struggling with and overcoming obstacles while solving a problem. Overcoming these obstacles provides students with the confidence they will need in order to tackle these types of problems that will occur in their journey through life.

Traditional teaching approaches involving rote learning and teacher-centered instruction often do not meet the learning needs of students who may be active learners because instruction is most effective when it is student-centered. When students memorize rules, they may be learning something, but they are not developing a good foundation in a given subject because the student is not seeing how things work or how things are related to each other. The goals of problem solving are to improve the student’s willingness to try problems, provide awareness of strategies, explaining how to approach problems in a systematic way, and demonstrating that problems can be solved in multiple ways.

The best approach to teaching problem solving is to use content related to real-world problem solving experiences because this helps motivate students and sparks their interest in solving real-world problems. By providing this type of framework, educators are able to create opportunities for students to make discoveries that allow them to make concepts more concrete and that will aid them for the rest of their lives.