Critique: The Case for Instruction in the Use of General Problem-Solving Strategies in Mathematics Teaching: A Comment on Owen and Sweller

1990 ◽  
Vol 21 (5) ◽  
pp. 403-410
Author(s):  
Michael J. Lawson
Keyword(s):  
Problem Solving ◽  
General Problem ◽  
Mathematics Teaching ◽  
Worked Examples ◽  
Specific Knowledge ◽  
Domain Specific ◽  
Domain Specific Knowledge ◽  
Explicit Consideration ◽  
Problem Solving Strategies ◽  
Knowledge And Practice

Owen and Sweller (1989) question the wisdom of recent moves to allocate time in mathematics teaching to instruction in the use of general problem-solving strategies because they doubt that such instruction will help overcome problems in the transfer of learning. According to Owen and Sweller transfer failure is more likely to be the result of a lack of appropriate schema or insufficient automation of rules. They imply that attention allocated to general problem-solving strategies would be more appropriately diverted to instruction concerned with domain-specific knowledge and practice with worked examples and goal-modified problems. Because curricula in several countries are in the process of being modified to incorporate explicit consideration of the nature of general problem-solving strategies, Owen and Sweller's view that the evidence on the efficacy of such instruction is “very sparse” deserves examination.

scholarly journals Componential Theories of Creativity: A Case Study of Teaching Creative Problem Solving

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Rennick ◽  
Kenneth McKay
Keyword(s):  
Problem Solving ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Specific Knowledge ◽  
Engineering Programs ◽  
First Semester ◽  
Domain Specific ◽  
Domain Specific Knowledge ◽  
Verification Process ◽  
Engineering Pedagogy

Engineering is the discipline of applying scientific and mathematical tools to solve practical problems for society. At the core of a person’s problem-solving abilities is their creativity. This is a preliminary and exploratory theory-based paper summarizing the two most prevalent componential theories of creativity as applied to a case study. These theories outline a set of processes which contribute to a person’s ability to be creative in a domain. The components differ slightly between models, but include: motivation; domain-specific knowledge, skills, and abilities; and cognitive process of creativity including problem finding, ideation, and evaluation.To demonstrate the practical application of these theories to engineering pedagogy, they will be applied to a case study of a 2-day academic hackathon called “Tron Days”. Tron Days guides students through a multi-step modelling and verification process and concludes with teams of students designing and constructing a robotic arm. At the end of the second day, students demonstrated their functioning robotic prototypes. This event has now been run twice for first semester Mechatronics Engineering students, and similar implementations with different problems have been run in seven other engineering programs at the same institution. Each section of this paper will demonstrate the application of componential theories of creativity by drawing connections to the Tron Days event.

Using Analogy to Cluster Hand-Drawn Sketches for Sketch-Based Educational Software

AI Magazine ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria D. Chang ◽  
Kenneth D. Forbus
Keyword(s):  
Educational Software ◽  
Specific Knowledge ◽  
Conceptual Information ◽  
Domain Specific ◽  
Domain Specific Knowledge ◽  
Problem Solving Strategies ◽  
Cluster A ◽  
Analogical Retrieval ◽  
Use Of Models ◽  
Common Misconceptions

One of the major challenges to building intelligent educational software is determining what kinds of feedback to give learners. Useful feedback makes use of models of domain-specific knowledge, especially models that are commonly held by potential students. To empirically determine what these models are, student data can be clustered to reveal common misconceptions or common problem-solving strategies. This article describes how analogical retrieval and generalization can be used to cluster automatically analyzed hand-drawn sketches incorporating both spatial and conceptual information. We use this approach to cluster a corpus of hand-drawn student sketches to discover common answers. Common answer clusters can be used for the design of targeted feedback and for assessment.

Expressing and Exploiting the Common Subgoal Structure of Classical Planning Domains Using Sketches

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominik Drexler ◽  
Jendrik Seipp ◽  
Hector Geffner
Keyword(s):  
Polynomial Time ◽  
General Problem ◽  
Single Step ◽  
Temporal Logics ◽  
Specific Knowledge ◽  
Domain Specific ◽  
Planning Methods ◽  
Domain Specific Knowledge ◽  
The Common

Width-based planning methods deal with conjunctive goals by decomposing problems into subproblems of low width. Algorithms like SIW thus fail when the goal is not easily serializable in this way or when some of the subproblems have a high width. In this work, we address these limitations by using a simple but powerful language for expressing finer problem decompositions introduced recently by Bonet and Geffner, called policy sketches. A policy sketch R over a set of Boolean and numerical features is a set of sketch rules that express how the values of these features are supposed to change. Like general policies, policy sketches are domain general, but unlike policies, the changes captured by sketch rules do not need to be achieved in a single step. We show that many planning domains that cannot be solved by SIW are provably solvable in low polynomial time with the SIW_R algorithm, the version of SIW that employs user-provided policy sketches. Policy sketches are thus shown to be a powerful language for expressing domain-specific knowledge in a simple and compact way and a convenient alternative to languages such as HTNs or temporal logics. Furthermore, they make it easy to express general problem decompositions and prove key properties of them like their width and complexity.

‘I’m an expert in me and I know what I can cope with’: Patient expertise in rheumatoid arthritis

2014 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 249-261 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tessa Sanderson ◽  
Jo Angouri
Keyword(s):  
Rheumatoid Arthritis ◽  
Meta Analysis ◽  
Healthcare Systems ◽  
Specific Knowledge ◽  
Active Involvement ◽  
Domain Specific ◽  
Access To Health ◽  
Patient Expertise ◽  
Domain Specific Knowledge ◽  
The Uk

The active involvement of patients in decision-making and the focus on patient expertise in managing chronic illness constitutes a priority in many healthcare systems including the NHS in the UK. With easier access to health information, patients are almost expected to be (or present self) as an ‘expert patient’ (Ziebland 2004). This paper draws on the meta-analysis of interview data collected for identifying treatment outcomes important to patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Taking a discourse approach to identity, the discussion focuses on the resources used in the negotiation and co-construction of expert identities, including domain-specific knowledge, access to institutional resources, and ability to self-manage. The analysis shows that expertise is both projected (institutionally sanctioned) and claimed by the patient (self-defined). We close the paper by highlighting the limitations of our pilot study and suggest avenues for further research.

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