Dissemination of ThinkSpace: an online delivery tool of authentic, complex problems to increase students' problem-solving skills

Iowa State University, Ames IA

Investigators

Abstract

Interdisciplinary (99) Progress in our technological society depends on people with strong quantitative, diagnostic, and problem-solving skills; yet our current methods for teaching problem-solving are inadequate. Most students are unable to deal with complex real-world problems because the problem-solving tasks typically encountered in school require use of limited strategies like identifying and applying the correct formulae or strategies from the textbook. Building on earlier successes in helping students develop more effective problem solving skills, the project is building a community of faculty engaged in problem solving education and disseminating a new online case delivery tool (called "ThinkSpace") to that community so that complex real-world problems can be incorporated into existing courses. Recognizing that instructional practice is highly resistant to change, the strategy employed in this project to achieve systemic change is to build core groups of faculty at participating universities who are committed to problem-solving education. ThinkSpace can be used in a broad variety of disciplines and maintained by sharing the load in an open source software environment. Making ThinkSpace open source leads to continuous improvement as its use in the classroom stimulates suggestions for improvements. The team assembled for this dissemination task has expertise in faculty development and dissemination of teaching innovations, as well as extensive experience in using online tools to introduce authentic, complex, problems in their courses. The scalability of this approach means that it is quite possible to support future expansion of the community in higher education as well as K-12. This could produce a transformative change in STEM fields, because the widespread use of authentic, complex problems will help a large number of students develop stronger problem-solving skills.