problem solving skills for historians

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Building New Course Structures

6 Teaching Undergraduate History: A Problem-Based Approach

Robert K. Poch and Eskender Yousuf

problem solving, historical thinking skills, learning assessment

Introduction

Among the challenges that faculty encounter is facilitating active engagement with their discipline within classrooms of diverse undergraduate students (Calder, 2006; Rendon, 2009). We face this challenge regularly when teaching history. Within a mostly lecture-based format, it is easy to deny students opportunities to engage the discipline as historians.

While we concentrate primarily on the discipline of history, this approach can be applied within other disciplines where the aim is to provide diverse undergraduate students with the opportunity to “do” the work of those disciplines and find personal connection within them.  Historians discover and use primary source documents, confront vexing contextual and interpretational problems, experience the diverse perspectives of peers, and so too can students. For many faculty, the temptation in undergraduate survey courses is to place full emphasis on content coverage and to ignore or minimize development of discipline-based skills (Calder, 2006; Sipress and Voelker, 2009). This produces poor results if our instructional goals include providing a more genuine experience with our discipline, developing analytic skills, and engaging students meaningfully (Weimer 2002). When students are passive recipients of disciplinary information with no apparent connection to themselves, they withdraw intellectually and emotionally (Freire 1970; Langer 1997).

However, it is possible for highly diverse students to experience the dynamic nature of disciplines such as history by “doing” – that is, by actively developing the skills and engaging the processes and problems involved in being a practitioner of the discipline (Sipress and Voelker, 2009; Weimer, 2002). This can happen in large and small classes and also in survey courses. We want students to encounter history as historians. We also want them to experience the excitement of historical discovery and personal meaning-making that first drew us into the work. In doing so, students also learn and retain substantive course content.

We focus below on a “problem-based” approach to teaching and learning history where students are active disciplinary practitioners engaged in addressing problem topics of relevance and connection to their diverse lives. In doing so, the following questions are addressed:

• What are some of the core elements of historical inquiry? What do skilled historians actually do?
• What actions encourage students from different cultural and disciplinary backgrounds to engage the core elements of historical inquiry as practitioners?
• How can course pedagogy, assignments, and assessments become consistent with what skilled historians do and foster student engagement?
• How can the results of these efforts be assessed? What are some of the assessment results from using a problem-based approach to learning history?

While we concentrate primarily on the discipline of history, this approach can be applied within other disciplines where the aim is to provide diverse undergraduate students with the opportunity to “do” the work of those disciplines and find personal connection within them (Gurung, Chick, and Haynie, 2009).

Identifying and Using Core Elements of Historical Inquiry

In creating learning environments where students become historians, it is necessary to consider what it is that historians do and what skills are necessary to be practitioners of the discipline. In a macro sense, many historians describe their work as problem solving guided by active questioning (Elton, 1967; Fischer, 1970; Marius and Page, 2005; Nevins, 1963). That is, questions are posed; sources and facts are collected, critically read, contextualized, and organized; and, an interpretation of the past is formed while recognizing that the complexities of history defy easy explanations (Ayers, 2006; Commager, 1965; Wineburg, 1991, 1999). Whenever possible, historians utilize primary sources to form their own interpretations rather than relying mostly on the interpretations of other historians.

Historians are regularly challenged to analyze, contextualize, and interpret the past from incomplete disparate sources. Such actions require a series of more discrete skills including the critical evaluation, interpretation, and communication of evidence; the detection of bias; and careful consideration of historical causation (Ayers, 2005; Barzun and Graff, 1977; Bloch, 1953; Carr, 1961; Commager, 1965; Elton, 1967; Evans, 1999; Fischer, 1970; Lerner, 1997; Nevins, 1963; Wood, 2008). These skills are expressed concisely as the “5Cs” of historical thinking: “change over time, causality, context, complexity, and contingency” (Andrews and Burke, 2007, 1).

Through using the 5Cs, students become increasingly aware of how much can change over time – such as political systems, landscapes, and social values – while, simultaneously, acknowledging retention of strong elements of the past such as holidays and the rituals surrounding them. Further, once developed through classroom engagement with historical sources, the elements of causality, context, complexity, and contingency enable students to identify and appreciate the incomplete nature of historical records and the intricate, simultaneous, and broad scale human interactions and competing interests in history (Ayers, 2006; Nevins, 1963; Wood, 2008). The awareness of complexity causes professional historians and students to probe more deeply into explanations of causality and to reject simplistic reasoning.

To have students engage history problems in a manner that is relevant and meaningful, it is necessary to also think carefully about how to invite students and their interests into the process of historical inquiry. While engineering, mathematics, physics and accounting are experienced as real, relevant, and practical, history is not experienced that way. Students often encounter it as an abstruse, fact-laden, memorization-based, irrelevant, impersonal discipline. We must, therefore, address how to engage students in being practitioners of historical inquiry and interpretation. These are some of the key components of the real work of historians and the historical reasoning used to create interpretations of the past. In working with undergraduate students – some of whom just graduated from high school – the 5Cs are a useful, understandable, and easy to remember toolset for engaging historical inquiry. With these parts of the work of historians and historical thinking in mind, it is possible to design classroom experiences that bring students into the dynamic nature of this work and its associated challenges. Students can then experience the discipline of history more fully and also learn how to create their own historical meaning from available sources (Sipress and Voelker, 2009). These components of historical thinking help to form the “history problems” that we utilize in our U.S. history classroom and which we describe further below.

However, to have students engage history problems in a manner that is relevant and meaningful, it is necessary to also think carefully about how to invite students and their interests into the process of historical inquiry. While engineering, mathematics, physics and accounting are experienced as real, relevant, and practical, history is not experienced that way. Students often encounter it as an abstruse, fact-laden, memorization-based, irrelevant, impersonal discipline. We must, therefore, address how to engage students in being practitioners of historical inquiry and interpretation.

Engaging Students in Core Elements of Historical Inquiry as Practitioners

The invitation to participate in our class, “America’s Past and Present: Multicultural Perspectives,” is underscored by bringing students into direct interaction with historical thinking skills, primary source materials that are reflective of multiple cultures on the American landscape, and with complex historical issues and problems that invite students to interpret history with their own voices rather than having a textbook or the instructor be the sole interpretive voices. We want students to gain more elegant and inclusive views of history that expose the complex dynamics between people over time and which stimulate curiosity about how life was experienced and interpreted by different diverse populations. This is enabled in part by the diversity of our students. The multiple complexities of persons in the past are reflected in our students. As observed by Lee, Poch, Shaw, and Williams (2012),

“…we have observed our institution’s student population become increasingly diverse in terms of racial and ethnic demographics. Historically, generalized categories of racial and ethnic identity have become more diffuse and complex. We are also more mindful of the often less visible forms of difference that are present in any learning environment, such as socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, religion, disability, and many others”

As students engage each other in class and discover how their classmates form different historical interpretations based in part on their different lived experiences, it stimulates and reinforces an understanding of the different perspectives and lived experiences of persons throughout history.

To better ensure the relevance of the history problems to diverse student interests, students are asked on the first day of the course what part of U.S. history between the Civil War and present time is of greatest interest to them. While some students do not know how to answer such a question at first, many others have some notion of their interests. Examples of these student responses from spring semester 2015 are as follows:

• World War II
• U.S. Civil Rights movements (including the role of youth in such movements)
• Vietnam War
• The Great Depression
• 9/11 and its effect on the world
• Other countries and perceptions of the U.S.
• Native Americans and Tribes
• Civil War & differing economies

When we, as instructors, are responsive to such interests, students more fully engage with the topics and are willing to invest the energy to do the challenging work of historical meaning-making using disciplinary thinking skills. These interests are invaluable in making the course ours – that is, a shared experience of historical investigation that reflects mutual interests rather than those of the instructor alone. It is a powerful opportunity to communicate to students at the beginning of the course that the instructors are engaged co-investigators of historical topics that the students suggest and that student interests are of great value. We use student historical interests to create substantive class discussion questions, short reading and writing assignments, and further engagement with historical thinking skills through lengthier history problems that come later in the semester. While assembling sources related to the interests, we spend the first three to four weeks of the course introducing and practicing the 5Cs of historical thinking. Initial reading and writing assignments selected before the course starts enable students to begin the process of understanding, recognizing, and using context, causality, complexity, change and continuity over time, and contingency. These historical thinking skills are then used to explore more deeply and intentionally the historical topics that students suggest. In doing so, student interests become integrated and useful parts of the course experience.

Students also tell us that they want to explore historical themes and issues that are not commonly approached in historical texts or rooted in fact memorization. For example, one student expressed in a topical interest survey that she wanted “…to learn the truth about history. The real original text. I want to find it and research it. Interest in causality and what caused all the events in history to happen? WHYYY! The reason things went down the way they did!” Students express that they want to explore the meaning and use of racism, the rise of feminism, and the perspectives of other nations whose histories intersect with those of the United States. They want to do so in a way that engages history through interesting questions full of encounters with ordinary people who experienced the past in powerful but mostly unknown ways. When we, as instructors, are responsive to such interests, students more fully engage with the topics and are willing to invest the energy to do the challenging work of historical meaning-making using disciplinary thinking skills.

Making Pedagogy, Assignments, and Assessments Consistent with what Historians Actually Do

Engaging students as historians takes careful thought and planning. Core elements of course design are important parts of this work. The course curriculum must provide space for the development of student evaluative and interpretive skills. This often comes with winnowing some course content as traditionally delivered through lengthy lectures (Calder, 2006). The process of winnowing involved using part of a summer break to critically review course materials to identify where unnecessary content was located that cluttered class time and reduced the capacity to develop student historical thinking skills. For example, a discussion of Civil War medicine and pro- and anti-U.S. imperialist arguments were removed given that they were peripheral to more important course themes. Further, those subjects tended to lead to more lecturing rather than active discussion. Rendon (1993) observed that “…many culturally diverse students do not learn best through lecture. Instead, we should focus on collaborative learning and dialogue that promote critical thinking, interpretation and diversity of opinion” (10).

Students can mine rich primary sources of the period as guided by research questions collaboratively developed by students and the instructor. Lectures are balanced with skill-building by doing – actively engaging students in learning how to develop researchable questions, engaging primary and secondary texts with critical lenses, forming interpretations from available evidence, and presenting results. Further, significant thought must be invested in designing course assignments and resources that enable skill development to occur and be assessed. Assessments must be constructed to evaluate student work in a manner consistent with skill development expectations. Class time invested in developing the foundational skills used within the discipline is necessary given that “…history teachers cannot simply present students with documents, tell them what to do, and then expect magical gains in the development of students’ historical sense. Much more elaborate and carefully thought out ‘scaffolding’ is needed to realize the potential of this approach” (Calder et al., 2002, 59).

This approach has significant student developmental implications. It may involve moving students and the course structure away from a dualistic form of learning history where questions are framed in terms of right and wrong response outcomes and there is strong dependency upon the instructor. Instead, there will be movement toward a course design wherein students are met with formulating questions within a course-related area of personal historical interest that has interpretive complexities associated within it (Donald, 2002, 3; Evans et al, 2010).

For example, rather than presenting students with a course design that asks them to identify within an exam three major outcomes of Reconstruction after the U.S. Civil War from lecture notes, students can experience the real problems of Reconstruction in depth by reading conflicting newspaper accounts in the North and the South regarding the political enfranchisement of African American men and the political balances of power that were at play (Langer, 1989). Rather than searching secondary and tertiary sources (such as many textbooks and lectures) alone for such information, students can mine rich primary sources of the period as guided by research questions collaboratively developed by students and the instructor. One research question that was developed in this manner focused on the tactics that some southern states utilized to stymie the voting capacity of black males following passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. In response, students were able to find and analyze different literacy tests for voting (the class even tried taking some of the tests which produced a high failure rate) and also details on the administration of poll taxes.

Such collaboration and student interpretive responsibilities can lead to movement from what psychologist Ellen Langer refers to as “mindlessness” wherein students are stuck with rote memorization and the search for the “right” answer rather than experiencing the rich contexts and possibilities that exist as part of the act of discovering and making meaning within disciplines (Langer, 1997). Langer notes that, “In math, teaching for understanding involves teaching students to think about what a problem means and to look for multiple solutions. Studies have confirmed that science is better taught through hands-on research and discovery than through memorization alone. In English, teaching for understanding means emphasizing the process of writing and exploring literature rather than memorizing grammar rules and doing drills. Understanding is encouraged in history by turning students into junior historians” (Langer, 1997, 71, 72). It is in that spirit that we developed history problems.

History Problems

 “As an interpretive historian using the primary source readings that are provided in this problem, how do you define Jim Crow?” This question, which seems deceptively simple at first, quickly exposes the complexities of Jim Crow as a comprehensive system within American society that touched every aspect of life. Each history problem is comprised of three essential parts: an introduction to the problem with concise contextual information; open-ended problem questions designed to provide students with interpretive space to utilize their voice and perspectives (rather than the instructor’s voice or that of the textbook); and a set of primary source materials that reflect diverse authors and views. Students are given three history problems throughout the semester and they have approximately four weeks to complete them given the complexity of the readings. Although there is no required page length for the problem responses, students often write seven pages or more for each problem. The history problems used during the Spring 2015 semester were based on student interests expressed at the beginning of the semester and involved the following topics: “The challenges of Jim Crow and the dynamics found within it;” “’Equal protection under the law:’ The challenges of separate but equal – The struggle for Brown v. Board of Education ;” and, “September 11, 2001.”

The history problem questions provide students with the ability to create responses based on their own interpretation of the material. The questions replicate real challenges and problems for historians that are consistent with the 5Cs of historical thinking that we use in class. Some questions expose students to the complexities of powerful systems of racial oppression such as Jim Crow. Other questions focus on establishing context or examining change over time. For example, in the problem examining Jim Crow, students were asked the following: “As an interpretive historian using the primary source readings that are provided in this problem, how do you define Jim Crow?” This question, which seems deceptively simple at first, quickly exposes the complexities of Jim Crow as a comprehensive system within American society that touched every aspect of life.

To assist in developing a definition of Jim Crow, the history problem packet includes a variety of primary sources that include memoirs, excerpts from scholarly books and novels, and a 1949 travel guide for African American motorists. Within this particular problem packet, the sources included pieces from W.E.B. Dubois’ The Souls of Black Folk (1903); Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952); John Hope Franklin’s autobiography, Mirror to America (2005); Howard Thurman’s The Luminous Darkness: A Personal Interpretation of the Anatomy of Segregation and the Ground of Hope (1965); Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children (1940); and, The Negro Motorist Green Book (1949). The Green Book was published to provide African American travelers with “…information that will keep him from running into difficulties, embarrassments and to make his trips more enjoyable” (1). These sources provided different views of and experiences with Jim Crow and, unlike a textbook, did not provide the definition and interpretation of Jim Crow for the students. Instead, the students worked with the different texts, situated them contextually in their particular time and place and with consideration of who wrote them, and gradually developed their own definition of Jim Crow. Further, the sources spanned a number of decades so that some consideration could be given to change over time in addition to complexity. The sources worked well in providing multiple perspectives of how Jim Crow, as a system, affected different parts of life and also a sense of the varieties of materials that historians use.

The same history problem also asked students to consider how the sources in the packet related to any prior readings we had used in the course (such as Frederick Douglass’ 1865 speech, “What the Black Man Wants”), so that students could further analyze and gain familiarity with context, change over time, complexity, contingency, and causality. Douglass’ speech was useful not only as an earlier expression of the challenges and contradictions that Jim Crow created within a nation that professed freedom and democracy, but also served as a source to explore the challenging concept of contingency. By expressing how black men wanted political participation through receipt of the right to vote and full recognition for their intellectual capacity to be informed contributors to democracy, Douglass’ speech highlighted contingencies necessary for breaking explicit bonds of enslavement and more diffuse societal systems of oppression. These varied course and problem-based primary sources enabled students to make complex connections between forms of evidence and further solidified historical thinking skills as expressed within the 5Cs. Providing approximately four weeks to work with each history problem gave plenty of in-class time to further discuss the sources, the context of the sources, and to practice the skills necessary to utilize them effectively.

Assessing the Results of Using a Problem-Based Approach to Learning History

We utilized several forms of assessment to evaluate the problem-based approach to learning history: 1) the evaluation of student written responses to history problems, 2) individual interviews with students, and, 3) an independently conducted end-of-semester student survey. In each assessment approach, it was important that student voices were prominent and listened to attentively (Patton, 1980). Each of these assessment forms is discussed below.

Written responses to history problems

Student written responses to the four history problems were evaluated carefully for progressive use of the elements of historical thinking. Each of the papers went through two evaluative reviews – one by the course teaching assistant and the other by the primary instructor. The papers were scored on a standard A-F grading scale and were preceded by smaller writing assignments that practiced discrete elements of five identified historical thinking skills. For example, the Frederick Douglass speech, “What the Black Man Wants,” was used early in the semester in part so students could practice establishing and expressing context and recognizing some elements of contingency. This was done with multiple other pieces of short reading and writing exercises that involved the voices and writing of diverse speakers and authors. With this practice experience in place, students could move with greater confidence in addressing contextual issues in the first history problem and those that followed. The papers were also useful in assessing student command or struggle with certain components of historical thinking. We discovered in multiple early papers that students did not fully understand the idea of contingency and, in response, were able to spend more time discussing and practicing it in class.

Toward the end of the semester as students worked with perhaps the most challenging history problem involving the September 11, 2001 attacks, we could detect that students were engaging in far more sophisticated historical reasoning and explicit use of historical thinking skills. For example, one student, a freshman, having studied the presence and role of the United States in the Middle East since the early twentieth-century (using maps, documents, interviews, reports, and political cartoons provided in the fourth history problem), constructed a complex contextual background in her written response to one set of the problem questions (“Using information from our class sessions and the materials provided within this problem packet, describe the relationships that existed and some of the events that occurred between the United States and the ‘Middle East’ region prior to 9/11. With these sources in mind, what are some of the possible motives for the 9/11 attack?”). She responded in part in her introduction,

The events of September 11th, 2001 came as a shock to millions of American citizens; however, a complex history of rocky foreign relations combined with the struggles regarding religion and government in the ‘Middle East’ suggest that the attack was only one part of several interconnected issues. As we examine the context of the events surrounding the 9/11 attacks, the complexity of the United States’ position in world affairs, the major causes leading up to the attack, and contingency of other nations’ histories on our own, we can begin to analyze the affect that each of these has had on the aftermath of 9/11 over time… [the] ten to fifteen years before the attacks on the Twin Towers… show a deeply complex relationship between different nations. While the Saudi Arabian government aided the United States [in the Gulf War by providing a U.S. military staging ground along the border with Kuwait] there were other entities such as Iraq that were pitted against the United States, resulting in conflict between the nations in that area regarding involvement of the United States. To add to this complexity is the idea of a theocracy and questions on how to rule a nation when military forces within those nations do not share the political philosophy or religious beliefs of those nations.

In this brief excerpt which was supported by lengthier supporting text and examples, we could easily detect the use of historical thinking skills (some of which were explicitly mentioned), including greater recognition of the deep complexities that long preceded the events of 9/11.

The written responses to the history problem questions were returned to the students with evaluative comments that served, in part, to prepare students for individual meetings with the course instructor and the graduate research assistant. With highly diverse students from different nations, it was important to provide different opportunities for the students to express how they approached the problems that extended beyond their written responses.

Individual meetings with students about the history problems

Individual student interviews were conducted on two of the problem set essays (history problems one and three). Each student was given the opportunity to schedule a conversation with us to discuss their responses and to further sharpen their historical thinking skills based on the 5Cs. During these meetings, the students could gain additional points (but no subtraction of points) by further clarifying their written responses and the processes that they used to construct them. The meeting questions were provided to each student in advance and included: Where did you encounter the greatest challenges in responding to this history problem? How did you approach the challenges? What do you believe you learned through engaging in this history problem? An opening question was designed to further probe each student’s writing by asking: “We found some engaging interpretations within your paper [if this was truthful] and also some places where we would like to know more. Can you further describe [this was customized for each student paper]….” The questions presented opportunities for students to further explain their own interpretations and how they approached the problems over time. Through the questions, students reflected on and expressed their own historical interpretations in a manner that replicates much of the way that historians utilize peers within their professional communities.

Within the second set of individual meetings on the third history problem, students began to express more of the 5Cs of historical thinking. During the first set of interviews regarding the “Challenges of Jim Crow and the dynamics found within it,” we met individually with twenty-three students who expressed a wide array of historical thinking skills. For example, one student, in expanding upon her interpretation of Jim Crow, remarked that developing her own definition of Jim Crow enabled her to “…go far below the surface to see the complexity of Jim Crow and its relationship to definitions of racism.” Further, the student explained that examining the use of Jim Crow-related art revealed to her the complex strategies of Jim Crow systems of oppression. Another student observed that reading primary source accounts of African Americans who lived within Jim Crow brought forth “contradictions” within the imagery and terms used within Jim Crow such as using ideas of “light” and “visibility” to describe American society while those who lived under the weight of Jim Crow described darkness, shadows, and invisibility. Within these comments, and many others, we observed students expressing different elements of historical thinking including complexity (very explicitly), as well as change over time, and causality as students considered and described the structures of Jim Crow messaging and how the messaging was delivered in different ways during specific spans of time.

Within the second set of individual meetings on the third history problem, students began to express more of the 5Cs of historical thinking. We used a slightly modified set of questions that included: Did you feel that you were able to utilize any particular historical thinking skills in this problem? Students commented more extensively and easily about historical thinking skills and demonstrated within their papers greater complexity in historical thinking. For example, one student expressed complex differences in how African American’s responded to racial oppression over time. She interpreted primary sources in the first history problem as being “defensive in nature – how persons responded or protected themselves within the Jim Crow system” whereas in the third history problem on the legal strategies that African American attorneys used to eventually prevail in the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the strategy was “more offensive in nature in that it showed black persons taking back their rights and being more confident in doing so.” This student, and others, expressed greater awareness and mastery of complexity, causality, and change over time in their interpretations of primary historical source materials.

Independently conducted end-of-semester student survey

At the request of the instructor, a grant-supported survey was developed and given to students in the history course at the very end of spring semester 2015. Among those who responded to the survey (50% of a class of 24 first-year students where this problem-based approach was fully implemented), the following are representative of their responses:

Question: What parts of the course were particularly effective for you in developing historical thinking skills and the capacity to be an effective historian? What parts were particularly ineffective?

• “The parts of this course that were effective in developing historical thinking skills were definitely the history problems and also the 5Cs. I learned so much through the history problems that I would have never learned through a test and I will remember the information much better by writing about it in a history problem. I didn’t feel like any part was ineffective.”
• “The history problems were effective because they allowed us to give our own opinion on the matter and we got involved instead of just mindless memorization.”
• “I think that the most effective things that we did in class to develop my historical thinking skills were definitely the problem sets and our class discussions. Both of those two platforms pushed us to think for ourselves and contribute to a larger group discussion. I loved the problem sets because they forced me to think and form my own opinions using the historical thinking skills that we were given.”
• “The history problems really helped me see how contemporary historians actually applied their skills to modern problems.”

Question: Do you believe that you know and can apply the essential elements of historical thinking, as a result of this course? Please explain.

• “Yes, I have already applied it to other classes and feel very comfortable doing it.”
• “Yes, the history problems gave us that opportunity.”
• “I do believe that I could apply the elements of historical thinking into other classes and in my everyday life as a historian. I feel confident that I know the 5Cs of historical thinking and could use them in other situations. They were drilled into us, I won’t forget them.”
• “Yes. I believe that using the 5Cs from the beginning of this course helped me to gain further knowledge and also to help me dig deeper into historical problems and questions.”
• “I definitely feel that this course has aided my skills in critical analysis and historical thinking and I can see how to use these skills in different contexts and subjects besides history.”

Student survey responses found that 1) history thinking elements of the 5C’s gave them a grasp of historical thinking skills; 2) established a process whereby students could formulate their own interpretations of historical sources thereby moving from mindless memorization to mindfulness and, 3) students were able to utilize their own lived experiences and interests as historians engaged in investigating historical problems.

The use of history problems in our course stems from a twofold purpose. First, we want students to experience the discipline of history as actively engaged historians who use primary sources in addressing challenging questions of historical interpretation through use of well-defined historical thinking skills. Second, we want to facilitate personal interaction with the discipline by using sources and stories that are reflective of the diversity of our students and enabling their interpretive voices to emerge and be respected in our assessments of their learning. Through the use of history problems, unlike our past exams, we noticed the disappearance of instructor voice in student interpretations of historical source materials and an increase in deliberate use of the 5Cs of historical thinking: context, change over time, contingency, complexity, and causality. Continued exploration of the use of history problems in developing more focused development of particular historical thinking skills will occur in our future work as will the capacity to assess those skills effectively through combinations of written work and in-person conversational interactions with students.

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Acknowledgements

Facilitation and evaluation of this project was enabled by the invaluable support and guidance of Ilene Alexander, Jeff Lindgren, and J.D. Walker. We also acknowledge the work and influence of the following excellent undergraduate teaching assistants who, over the last seven years, contributed to the development, implementation, and the strengthening of the problem based approach to teaching and learning: Emily DePalma, Emily McCune, Julianna Ryburn, Jade Beauclair Sandstrom, and Chris Stewart

Innovative Learning and Teaching: Experiments Across the Disciplines Copyright © 2017 by Individual authors is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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• 3 Questions: How history helps us solve today's issues

3 Questions: How history helps us solve today's issues

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Science and technology are essential tools for innovation, and to reap their full potential, we also need to articulate and solve the many aspects of today’s global issues that are rooted in the political, cultural, and economic realities of the human world. With that mission in mind, MIT's School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences has launched The Human Factor — an ongoing series of stories and interviews that highlight research on the human dimensions of global challenges. Contributors to this series also share ideas for cultivating the multidisciplinary collaborations needed to solve the major civilizational issues of our time.

Malick Ghachem is an attorney and a professor of history at MIT who explores questions of slavery and abolition, criminal law, and constitutional history. He is the author of  "The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution" (Cambridge University Press, 2012), a history of the law of slavery in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) between 1685 and 1804. He teaches courses on the Age of Revolution, slavery and abolition, American criminal justice, and other topics. MIT SHASS Communications recently asked him to share his thoughts on how history can help people craft more effective public policies for today's world.  Q: Your new research focuses on economic globalization and political protest in Haiti, a country with a complex social, political, and economic history. What lessons can we learn from Haiti's history that can inform more effective public policies? A: I think the most important lesson for public policy may be that we cannot ignore the distant past — and in the case of Haiti, by "distant past" I mean only so far back as the 18th century. (With apologies to colleagues who study the yet more distant centuries of ancient and medieval history!) Public policy has a short-term memory, however, and this is especially true of economic policy, which tends to look back only so far as the early 20th century to understand, for example, how a financial crisis comes about and what it entails.

Haiti showcases the decisive present-day impact and legacies of a history that goes back more than 300 years, to the rise of the slave plantation system. My current work tells the story of a planter rebellion in the 1720s against the French Indies Company, an event that ended the era of slave-trading monopolies in Saint-Domingue (as Haiti was known under French rule) and left large-scale sugar planters in effective control of the colony.

Some of the key political and social cleavages that have characterized Haitian life ever since date back to this period. A history of Haiti that begins with the revolutionary years leading up to Haitian independence in 1804, or any period thereafter, will necessarily lack a handle on just how deeply rooted are Haiti’s current circumstances.

We can see this on any number of levels. Colonial history continues to hamper prospects for broad-based education in Haiti, as my colleague Michel DeGraff’s work on the linguistic politics of French vs. Haitian Kreyòl powerfully demonstrates. The environment is another example. Part of the resistance to accepting the reality of climate change (whether in Haiti or elsewhere) is a reluctance to acknowledge that history in this deep sense matters. Yet it is clear that deforestation in Haiti begins no later than the 17th century, when French settlers began using trees for purposes of lumber and fuel. By the time of Haiti’s independence, the lack of forest cover had already left many parts of the country vulnerable to flooding.

That historical perspective, in turn, suggests one of the difficulties that besets even the most well-intentioned relief work in Haiti today. Such work tends to focus on repairing the immediate damage caused by the latest “natural” catastrophe, whether an earthquake, a hurricane-induced flood, or an outbreak of contagious disease. These tragedies rightly call upon the generous aid of first-responders, but after the sense of emergency passes, the eyes of the world often turn elsewhere.

An understanding of how these tragedies draw on the full weight of Haitian history encourages and even demands a longer-term commitment to the problems at hand. And it suggests that effective responses to what seem like essentially medical, environmental, or legal problems must cut across conventional categories of policy analysis and understandings of responsibility. Take the case of United Nations liability for the cholera outbreak in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.

The natural impulse of human rights lawyers in that context was to file suit against the U.N., which then spent several years digging in its heels and denying its role in the outbreak. But the U.N.’s position in Haiti is a legacy of the much deeper impact that individual nations/states — most notably, France and the United States — have had on Haitian affairs over the course of three centuries. Framing responsibility in narrowly legal or chronological terms runs head-on into this reality and limits rather than expands our sense of the potential remedies.

Q: What connections do you see between economic conditions (including globalization and monetary policy) and the ability of a people or a culture to make innovations in science, technology, and public policy?

A: Waking up hungry each morning does not leave one with great deal of energy for scientific (or any other kind of) work during the day. The resources that make possible scientific and technological innovation are the same ones that sustain the relatively high standard of daily living many of us enjoy in the United States.

Haiti’s economy has long existed in a state of colonial dependency upon one or another foreign power; today it is the United States. The country’s economy is also beset by many woes, among them an ongoing currency crisis that makes the Haitian gourde an increasingly ineffective form of money. This fact places a premium on access to U.S. dollars, which elites and companies enjoy at the expense of workers paid in the local currency.

This is a crisis of sovereignty that takes the form of a monetary crisis. The earliest such currency crisis dates back (again) to the 1720s, and it’s one dimension of my current research. One of the two key triggers of the revolt against the Indies Company was a suspicion that the Company intended to eliminate the use of local Spanish silver coins, on which most colonists depended for their livelihood. The lack of a reliable and stable currency remained a problem throughout the colonial period and continues to severely constrict the economic horizons of many Haitians today.

Q: As MIT President Reif has said, solving the great challenges of our time will require multidisciplinary problem-solving — bringing together expertise and ideas from the sciences, technology, the social sciences, arts, and humanities. Can you share why you believe it is critical for any effort to address the well-being of human populations, and the planet itself, to incorporate tools and perspectives from the field of history? Also, what challenges do you see to multi-disciplinary collaborations — and how can we overcome them?

A: President Reif’s observation is correct and important. We also need to appreciate that, even within the world of the social sciences and the humanities, there are deep and abiding differences about how best to understand and implement public policy.

Let’s take the case of development economics. There is a growing literature, associated mostly with political economy and the new institutional economics, that seeks to explain the disparities in wealth and income between more and less “developed” nations. These works tend to suggest that there is a unifying model, theory, or historical pattern that accounts for the disparities: political corruption, institutional competence, the rule of law, protection of private property, etc. These phenomena are all important, but the particular forms they take can really only be understood on a case-by-case basis.

It’s important to do the unglamorous, nitty-gritty, heavily historical work of understanding the local and the particular — which requires much more patience that even those social scientists who speak of “path dependence” tend to exhibit. I believe that this kind of sustained patience for understanding the local in historical contexts is itself a tool of public policy, a way of seeing and talking about the world, and (if wielded correctly) an instrument of power and justice.

One of the principal ways historians can contribute to problem-solving work at MIT and elsewhere is by helping to identify what the real problem is in the first place. When we can understand and articulate the roots and sources of a problem, we have a much better chance of solving it.

Interview prepared by MIT SHASS Communications Editorial team: Kathryn O'Neill, Emily Hiestand (series editor)

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Problem solving like a historian.

• Introduction
• Secondary Sources
• Primary Sources
• Sources in Action

before you start Why do you think it’s important to study past economic challenges in U.S. history?

1. Introduction

We often hear about “the economy” in the news as if it’s a mysterious and unpredictable force in our lives, but an economy is simply a system of how money changes hands and how goods and services are bought and sold. The economy is an essential part of society, so understanding what it is and how it impacts our daily lives allows us to adapt to economic changes using agility and problem solving.

In this challenge, we’ll explore present-day economic concerns by relating them to economic crises in U.S. history and exploring possible preparations and solutions. We will examine past economic downturns—the Great Recession of 2008, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Energy Crisis of the early 1970s, and the bursting of the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s—to understand how they affected people’s lives and how people survived them. Those who lived through these particularly challenging times had to be agile—adaptable, resourceful, and quick-thinking—to support themselves and their families through economic hardship.

As an important step in looking to the past to find solutions in the present, we’ll also examine how historians approach problem solving by using reliable sources to inform their solutions. And like historians, we too will learn how to evaluate potential sources to make sure they’re both trustworthy and closely related to what we’re investigating. Evaluating a source allows you to understand and apply information more effectively, making the source a powerful tool for problem solving.

Economy The system according to which money is acquired and spent and goods and services are bought and sold. Economic Crisis A sudden downturn in the financial health of a country, usually due to a decrease in production, an increase in unemployment, or uncontrolled inflation or deflation.

2. Problem Solving like a Historian

Historians also use their problem solving skill to find answers to questions they have about the past. But historians solve problems in a particular way: they investigate sources that contain information about the topic they’re studying so they can come up with the best possible answers.

Problem solving like a historian means using relevant and reliable information to come up with the best solution you can. Let’s look at some of the sources historians use when they investigate the past.

A historical source is a document or other item that provides information about the past. Historians use sources to answer questions about the past and, in some cases, to apply what they’ve learned to the future. Sources help paint a picture of an event and provide insights into how people thought and acted at the time.

• Primary sources are objects that were created at the time being studied.
• Secondary sources are created at a later date.

2a. Secondary Sources If a source describing a historical event doesn’t come directly from a firsthand or contemporary account, it’s a secondary source . Secondary sources are typically written by historians or journalists who are describing past events but were not actually present at the time.

• textbooks (such as this webtext)
• articles interpreting a topic or event
• biographies

Contemporary Happening or living at the same time. Secondary Source A description of an event created by someone who learned about it from other sources. Secondary sources often include analysis and interpretation. 2b. Primary Sources Primary sources are artifacts created during the time of an event by individuals living through it. They are the most important pieces of evidence that historians use to understand the past. It’s through finding and carefully analyzing primary sources that historians are able to answer questions about the past and make connections with what’s happening now.

• letters or journal entries
• newspaper articles published at the time of the event
• surveys, census data, maps, and other official records
• photographs or artwork
• interviews or oral histories

big idea It is important to note that primary sources are not necessarily better than secondary sources. Consider how individuals may manipulate their own stories to make themselves look better than they really are.

Primary Source An account of an event by someone who experienced it.

3. Sources in Action

Let’s look at a few examples of how primary and secondary sources could be used to investigate real questions.

Primary and secondary sources each provide valuable insights into events in history. Taken together, they help us learn lessons from the past.

Of course, you don’t have to be a historian to use sources for problem solving.

big idea If you think about it, you encounter sources every day—when you read the news in the morning, watch the weather report, or check last year’s sales figures at work. When you use that information to make decisions, you’re using sources for problem solving.

In this course, you’ll learn how to use historical sources carefully and thoughtfully. You’ll then be able to take those techniques and apply them to researching problems at work or at home. In the next lesson, we’ll look at strategies for identifying and evaluating sources that are both relevant and reliable.

summary In this lesson, you were introduced to four periods of economic instability in the United States that demanded agility and problem-solving to endure and overcome. You also learned what it means to problem-solve like a historian , by finding and evaluating sources to answer questions about the past. Historians make use of primary sources and secondary sources to learn about and interpret the past. By putting these sources into action together, historians can develop a more accurate understanding of the past than one type of source alone can provide. Finally, you learned that the same problem-solving techniques that historians utilize can be useful in your own endeavors. Best of luck in your learning!

Source: Strategic Education, Inc. 2020. Learn from the Past, Prepare for the Future.

Happening or living at the same time.

A sudden downturn in the financial health of a country, usually due to a decrease in production, an increase in unemployment, or uncontrolled inflation or deflation.

The system according to which money is acquired and spent and goods and services are bought and sold.

An account of an event by someone who experienced it.

A description of an event created by someone who learned about it from other sources. Secondary sources often include analysis and interpretation.

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Defining Authenticity in Historical Problem Solving

At Sammamish High School, we've identified seven key elements of problem-based learning, an approach that drives our comprehensive curriculum. I teach tenth grade history, which puts me in a unique position to describe the key element of authentic problems.

What is an authentic problem in world history? My colleagues and I grappled with this question when we set about to design a problem-based learning (PBL) class for AP World History. We looked enviously at some of our peer disciplines such as biology which we imagined having clear problems for students to work on (they didn't, but that is another blog post).

We consulted a number of sources in research. What did the College Board say? What do the state standards say? We reached out to Walter Parker, the social studies methods instructor at the University of Washington School of Education, to help us clarify our thinking.

We arrived at two ways to think about authentic problems. One I will call the work of historians in the field, and the other was the work of historical actors at the time. We quickly felt a healthy tension between these two ideas.

Living the Decisions

The work of historians involves creating and debating the frameworks for the historical narratives our students use to interpret history. One problem that historians debate is the question of periodization, or how history should be divided chronologically in order to better understand it. We know these chunks of time -- or eras -- by the more familiar labels given them by historians: classical, medieval and modern, to name a few. These debates are highly charged because they are so important in defining what students entering the field should study. For example, should World War I be considered a turning point in world history, or is World War I really a European civil war whose significance as a global turning point diminishes with passing of each decade?

It was exciting to consider that our students would engage in such high-level and rigorous academic thinking. We could think of many meaty questions for them to explore and discuss: What was the legacy of Mongol rule? Is the modern era a time of progress? Even the question, "Is there really such a thing as world history?" However, we wondered, was it realistic to ask students to do the work of historians? Could we prepare them well enough to have these highly abstract but critical conversations? College professors spend years steeping themselves exclusively in their discipline, while our students devote one seventh of their class time to world history. My colleague and I had both engaged students in such debates during our practice, but not in an integrated systematic way.

Our approach to authentic problems came from a different perspective: that of the historical actor and decision-makers. By giving students roles based around a historical problem we could ask them, "What would you do, and why?" This, of course, is nothing new. Teachers have been creating simulations and role-plays to engage their students for generations. We wanted to build a unit or "challenge cycle" around these activities.

Ultimately, we decided that it would be difficult for students to do the work of historians if they had not done the work of historical actors. By "living" the decisions through problem-based simulations, our students would collectively be better prepared to engage in the larger questions that are debated in the discipline of history.

Challenge Cycles

What did this look like in World History? We created challenge cycles based on each of the eras into which the course was divided. Our first attempt at building a PBL challenge cycle took place when we studied the Early Modern Era (1450-1750) and focused on the theme of diplomacy. Students were assigned to empire teams based on their interests, and they played the role of foreign policy advisors. Their mission: to determine how diplomacy could help their empire maintain and expand power. The simulation component culminated in a round of treaty negotiations between empires. We found that while students were energized and came to know their roles deeply, they were not directly engaging in the conversations and debates that historians have.

After we piloted our first PBL units, we built in a day for a debrief discussion explicitly linking the challenge cycle with the authentic questions that historians address. This debrief day also allowed students to drop their simulation roles, which frequently put them in competitive or modestly adversarial relationships with one another. They were free to argue against the position their historical figure would have taken. For example, during our diplomacy challenge debrief, the Ottoman Empire could argue the position of their Spanish archrivals. We also broke down our challenge cycle into components that allowed students to deepen their understanding of their historical actors in relation to others. In our diplomacy challenge, this meant building in a diplomatic reception in which our student diplomats had to toast an empire with which they wanted to engage in trade.

Diplomats and Historians

What kind of comments have we heard from students? Their response has become more positive as we have refined our pilot units. Here is a brief sample from a survey we took on our diplomacy challenge unit:

• "We all were sort of competing, which made us try harder."
• "The reception was super neat."
• "I really enjoyed knowing about my empire, therefore I wanted to learn more about that empire and master it . . . I liked the process: 1st power point, to get to know the empire. 2nd Toast. This process helped me understand the empires. ."
• "Elaborate more on what actually happened instead of the Socratic seminar [debrief] because I would've liked to know more concrete details."
• "Remove the reception (I think this could have been a two-week project)."

After a year of designing and testing the curriculum, we have come to understand that some problems and their components feel more authentic than others. Representatives of the early modern empires were rarely gathered together at one reception, and diplomacy is obviously conducted over a longer period of time with changing players. However, the toasts our student diplomats made at that diplomatic reception would not have been out of place at a White House state dinner (although our students' were briefer), and the skills they used in trying to woo a trading partner were just as real.

As we continue to refine this course of study, the healthy tension between the work of the historian and the work of the actor remains, as does the desire to create a curriculum where students can meaningfully engage in both.

Editor's Note: Visit " Case Study: Reinventing a Public High School with Problem-Based Learning " to stay updated on Edutopia's coverage of Sammamish High School.

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Shannon Bontrager

Professional skills, historical thinking.

Using Microsoft Teams as an LMS

/ Article Archive

/ Professional Skills, Historical Thinking

Publication Date

December 1, 2020

Perspectives Section

Perspectives Daily

Teaching & Learning

Teaching Methods

My students at Georgia Highlands College are smart, engaged, and mostly not history majors. In order to motivate them, I emphasize the skills and habits of mind that historians cultivate that will be useful in their own lives, especially as they enter the labor force. Inspired by the AHA’s Tuning Project , I have redesigned my introductory US and world history courses to emphasize transferable skills that students will recognize as relevant. In practice, this means more group projects with the intent of fostering collaboration, problem solving, and professionalization—skills that we know are essential to current work environments (and to historians).

Shannon Bontrager’s family introduced him to Microsoft Teams, a platform he now uses to encourage collaborative and innovative learning in his American history class.  Marvin Meyer/Unsplash

I maintain a 5/5 teaching responsibility at a two-year institution, often with multiple course preps. Like many of my colleagues, I struggled with my own workload even before COVID-19 upended our work; teaching and grading individual students’ performance was overwhelming. I needed to identify a way to develop student-led projects that would facilitate student peer review while reducing my grading load to a manageable level without sacrificing standards. I needed to create a system to pair more advanced students with less experienced ones so that they could collaborate with and mentor each other.

As I began to think about what this system might look like, my daughter came home from fourth grade excited about her teacher’s demonstration of Microsoft Teams , a suite of collaboration tools within Microsoft 365. My daughter could chat with her classmates, have video calls, and post emojis and gifs, all while uploading documents and editing them in real time. My wife’s company had also started using Teams. She described how more than 20 people were editing the same document seamlessly in real time while also on a video call. As they talked, I began to see how Teams could help me accomplish my dual goals of creating opportunities for students to collaborate while also controlling my workload.

For educators, Teams offers several advantages over other popular tools. The video call feature is much more secure than Zoom. From a desktop, laptop, or a mobile phone, students can make their own video calls with each other and they can share and edit documents in the same medium as they call and chat, making it more efficient than Google Docs. Teams also offers learning management system (LMS) features not readily available in Google, including a gradebook and assignments page. There are many other applications, including a sophisticated planner, that can be imported into Teams.

For educators, Teams offers several advantages over other popular tools.

When COVID-19 hit, my transition to Teams accelerated. This summer, my online students exclusively used Teams as I transitioned my courses away from their traditional LMS. I put students into groups of six and gave them their own space in Teams. There, they could access recorded lectures and work on their group project: an annotated bibliography, Pecha Kucha presentation, and a three-scene, 15-page screenplay based on primary sources in the Federal Writer’s Project Slave Narrative database .

Teams, software designed for both the workplace and the classroom, made it easy to assign roles to each student and to monitor their work. Students chose from specific roles within each group. One could be a program director that oversaw the entire group project and controlled the planner, three more could be project directors that oversaw each specific assignment, and the rest could fulfill associate roles. Everyone had to work together on all stages of the project. While I gave everyone the same grade for the group work, I also included a significant individual grade to incentivize students to perform their fair share of the work.

Teams can be like a panopticon. Everyone can see what everyone else writes. As the instructor, I can see student posts, view recorded group meetings asynchronously, and track individual task completion on the group planners. I used the analytics tool to evaluate and gain insights into individual and group performance. This revealed that students are willing to be responsible for their own behavior and keeping distracted students within their group on task. I can see as leaders emerge and take on management roles. These students tend to be more experienced and model peer mentorship for the less experienced. They often help develop rapport and even comradery within the group.

Teams also helps me manage my workload by encouraging efficient interaction. Instead of having to respond to one-on-one emails, I simply participate in group conversations as needed. The software allows me to respond to student questions individually or collectively, all within the same platform. Teams works so efficiently that it has become rare for a student leave the LMS to pose a question via email.

Teams can be like a panopticon.

Grading is more manageable too. Teams allows for complete Word or Excel functionality, which means I can comment, track changes, and even post emojis and stickers on student work. They see my comments in real time and some respond immediately, making edits of their own and improving their work even as I am grading it. In this way, the grading process itself becomes a collaboration between the teacher and the student.

All of the groups produced fascinating screenplays. One used the Magic School Bus (based on the cartoon) as a literary device to weave their critique of modern education and the lack of education for slaves together. Another used a classroom setting where students watched “documentaries” to learn about African American education during Reconstruction. Each screenplay cleverly used quotes from specific slave interviews and worked in citations from JSTOR articles.

This learning environment was so successful in an all-online format, I decided to implement it in my face-to-face early American history classes this fall. These students met in a flipped classroom: while I provide in-class lectures and learning exercises to contextualize slavery, students complete all their work inside of Teams. It supported exactly the kind of real-world skill building I wanted to produce and enabled the creation of excellent historical work. In their evaluations, students voiced overwhelming support for Teams and its functionality. Software like Teams allows the instructor to build relationships with students, who have access to a wide-range of electronic devices across the varied and new landscape of remote, flipped, and blended classrooms, to teach historical thinking and professionalization skills without sacrificing the quality of collaboration, interaction, and the nature of academic work.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Attribution must provide author name, article title, Perspectives on History , date of publication, and a link to this page. This license applies only to the article, not to text or images used here by permission.

Georgia Highlands College

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critical thinking

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• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Critical Thinking
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Critical Thinking
• Monash University - Student Academic Success - What is critical thinking?
• Oklahoma State University Pressbooks - Critical Thinking - Introduction to Critical Thinking
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critical thinking , in educational theory, mode of cognition using deliberative reasoning and impartial scrutiny of information to arrive at a possible solution to a problem. From the perspective of educators, critical thinking encompasses both a set of logical skills that can be taught and a disposition toward reflective open inquiry that can be cultivated . The term critical thinking was coined by American philosopher and educator John Dewey in the book How We Think (1910) and was adopted by the progressive education movement as a core instructional goal that offered a dynamic modern alternative to traditional educational methods such as rote memorization.

Critical thinking is characterized by a broad set of related skills usually including the abilities to

• break down a problem into its constituent parts to reveal its underlying logic and assumptions
• recognize and account for one’s own biases in judgment and experience
• collect and assess relevant evidence from either personal observations and experimentation or by gathering external information
• adjust and reevaluate one’s own thinking in response to what one has learned
• form a reasoned assessment in order to propose a solution to a problem or a more accurate understanding of the topic at hand

Theorists have noted that such skills are only valuable insofar as a person is inclined to use them. Consequently, they emphasize that certain habits of mind are necessary components of critical thinking. This disposition may include curiosity, open-mindedness, self-awareness, empathy , and persistence.

Although there is a generally accepted set of qualities that are associated with critical thinking, scholarly writing about the term has highlighted disagreements over its exact definition and whether and how it differs from related concepts such as problem solving . In addition, some theorists have insisted that critical thinking be regarded and valued as a process and not as a goal-oriented skill set to be used to solve problems. Critical-thinking theory has also been accused of reflecting patriarchal assumptions about knowledge and ways of knowing that are inherently biased against women.

Dewey, who also used the term reflective thinking , connected critical thinking to a tradition of rational inquiry associated with modern science. From the turn of the 20th century, he and others working in the overlapping fields of psychology , philosophy , and educational theory sought to rigorously apply the scientific method to understand and define the process of thinking. They conceived critical thinking to be related to the scientific method but more open, flexible, and self-correcting; instead of a recipe or a series of steps, critical thinking would be a wider set of skills, patterns, and strategies that allow someone to reason through an intellectual topic, constantly reassessing assumptions and potential explanations in order to arrive at a sound judgment and understanding.

In the progressive education movement in the United States , critical thinking was seen as a crucial component of raising citizens in a democratic society. Instead of imparting a particular series of lessons or teaching only canonical subject matter, theorists thought that teachers should train students in how to think. As critical thinkers, such students would be equipped to be productive and engaged citizens who could cooperate and rationally overcome differences inherent in a pluralistic society.

Beginning in the 1970s and ’80s, critical thinking as a key outcome of school and university curriculum leapt to the forefront of U.S. education policy. In an atmosphere of renewed Cold War competition and amid reports of declining U.S. test scores, there were growing fears that the quality of education in the United States was falling and that students were unprepared. In response, a concerted effort was made to systematically define curriculum goals and implement standardized testing regimens , and critical-thinking skills were frequently included as a crucially important outcome of a successful education. A notable event in this movement was the release of the 1980 report of the Rockefeller Commission on the Humanities that called for the U.S. Department of Education to include critical thinking on its list of “basic skills.” Three years later the California State University system implemented a policy that required every undergraduate student to complete a course in critical thinking.

Critical thinking continued to be put forward as a central goal of education in the early 21st century. Its ubiquity in the language of education policy and in such guidelines as the Common Core State Standards in the United States generated some criticism that the concept itself was both overused and ill-defined. In addition, an argument was made by teachers, theorists, and others that educators were not being adequately trained to teach critical thinking.

Problem solving skills versus knowledge acquisition: the historical dispute that split problem-based learning into two camps

• Reflections
• Open access
• Published: 30 May 2018
• Volume 24 , pages 619–635, ( 2019 )

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• Virginie F. C. Servant-Miklos   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1987-531X 1 , 2  

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This paper sheds light on an intellectual dispute on the purpose of problem-based learning that took place in the 1970s between two major figures in the history of PBL: Howard S Barrows from McMaster University and Henk Schmidt from Maastricht University. Using historical evidence from archive materials, oral history accounts and contemporary publications, the paper shows that at the core of the dispute was their divergent understanding of cognitive psychology. On the one hand, Barrows espoused hypothetico-deduction, and on the other, Henk Schmidt was a proponent of constructivism. The paper shows how the dispute played out both in the scientific literature and in the divergent practice of PBL at McMaster and Maastricht and continues to affect the way PBL is done today.

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Introduction

In 2009, Schmidt et al. ( 2009 ) acknowledged that there was not one but several types of problem-based learning curricula being used by medical schools in North America and beyond. Primarily, they distinguished between what they called Type 1 curricula, in which students are asked to generate a “mental model” of phenomena underlying a problem, and a Type 2, in which students “play doctor”, focusing on problem-solving and clinical reasoning skills. For the sake of simplicity, we shall refer to the former as the Knowledge Acquisition model, and the latter as the Problem-Solving Skills model. What Schmidt and colleagues did not explain is how, issued from a single source, namely McMaster University Medical School’s 1969 pioneering programme, the world of PBL came to be divided along this fault-line. The beginnings of PBL were recently the subject of extensive research and shall not be covered in detail here (Servant 2016 ). The story can be summarised as follows: in the period after the second World War, higher education experienced an unparalleled growth around the western world, which, combined with bountiful financial resources and a rising tide of anti-authoritarianism, contributed to the birth and development of many innovative higher education programmes in various disciplines. In Germany and Denmark, problem-oriented education grounded in critical theory emerged in social sciences and humanities, and later engineering, as a challenge to mainstream didactics (Servant-Miklos and Spliid 2017 ); in business education, the Harvard Case Method gained international traction (Garvin 2003 ); in medical education, Western Reserve University pioneered an organ systems-based approach, a direct ancestor to PBL (Williams 1980 ). Between 1966 and 1972 a group of creative Canadian medical educators assembled around McMaster Medical School’s founding Dean Dr. John Evans with the mission to start a new undergraduate medical education programme. They took the medical education world by storm when instead of opening a traditional school, they decided to develop a small-group, self-directed, problem-based learning curriculum (Spaulding 1991 ). Their students began their learning with biomedical problems under the guidance of a tutor who acted as a process guide rather than a lecturer, leaving students to do most of the studying in their own time (Spaulding 1968 ). By the time of Schmidt’s article, over 500 medical schools were using some form of PBL (Moust et al. 2007 ), the majority using the Problem-Solving Skills version, and a substantial minority the Knowledge Acquisition version. This division is interesting considering the substantial support that the latter position has gained in the scientific literature, often at the expense of the former—a support that this paper will surely reinforce. How did these two iterations emerge from the McMaster experiment? What is the difference between these two versions, and how does this play out in terms of the way PBL is conducted? Why does this difference matter for medical education? Using historical data from oral history interviews, archives from McMaster University and Maastricht University and contemporary publications, this paper will try to answer these questions and shed light on a little known but highly significant divide in medical education.

The research for this paper was done using an inductive and hermeneutic approach to historical data in provenance from three types of primary sources that were triangulated to make sense of the historical events and the meanings ascribed to them by those who experienced them. These three sources were oral history accounts from primary witnesses, who were interviewed in English on site at McMaster and Maastricht Universities; archival records from McMaster University, Maastricht University, the Rijksarchief in Limburg and the private collections of former teachers, students and managers and both institutions, and contemporary publications and out-of-print books and journals that were acquired via the second-hand market or directly from the authors. Events, their meanings and interpretations were given weight according to how many independent sources could support the interpretation. Where a conflict emerged between the recollections of a witness in an oral history account and a written record, the written record was given precedence unless there was overwhelming oral historical evidence to the contrary. In writing this paper, the focus was on interpreting and analysing an important historical development rather than on providing a descriptive history of what happened at McMaster and Maastricht.

Why did two iterations of PBL emerge from the original McMaster model?

To understand how two different interpretation of PBL emerged from the original experiment at McMaster, it is important to understand that the 1969 McMaster programme was not designed as a realisation of educational theory principles, as has often been claimed. The five founding fathers of PBL at McMaster University were pioneers and innovators, but not education theorists. In 1966, Dr. John Evans drafted a one-page bullet-pointed list of ideas which became the founding principles of PBL, but he never wrote anything significant to justify his choice of items for the list (Evans 1966 ). The list read as follows:

“The Following is an outline of the objectives for the McMaster M.D. Programme as expressed in terms of knowledge, abilities and attitudes that McMaster would like a graduate of the programme to have acquired or developed:

The ability to identify and define health problems, and search for information to resolve or manage these problems.

Given a health problem, to examine the underlying physical or behavioural mechanisms. […]

The ability to recognize, maintain and develop personal characteristics and attitudes required for professional life […]

The clinical skills and methods required to define and manage health problems of patients, including their physical, emotional and social aspects.

The ability to become a self-directed learner, recognizing personal education needs, selecting appropriate learning resources and evaluating progress.

To assess professional activity, both personal and that of other health professionals

To function as a productive member of a small group, which is engaged in learning, research or healthcare.

To be aware of and able to work in a variety of health care settings.”

As far as we know, his main source of inspiration was the Flexner report (McAuley 1979 ), but extracting from this anything more than general statements about the outdatedness of lecture-based medical education would be a stretch. Evans’ right-hand man Bill Spaulding occasionally mused about the 16th Century humanist Johannes Comenius (Spaulding 1968 ), but Spaulding’s role as the Chair of McMaster’s Education Committee was more that of a nuts-and-bolt planner than an education philosopher. Jim Anderson, possibly the most creative of the founding fathers, may have been inspired by humanistic principles, but he was really an inspired anatomist, not an education psychologist (Barrows 1996a , b ). Neither of the final two members of the Education Committee—Fraser Mustard and Bill Walsh—had read much beyond what was widely circulating in higher education circles at the time; namely Mager’s Behaviour Objectives (Mager 1962 ) and the work of Knowles on self-directed learning (Knowles 1975 ). The lack of strong and coherent theoretical underpinnings for the programme meant that the McMaster experiment was more of a trial-and-error process in constant development than an application of cleverly crafted educational ideas. The fact that the term “problem-based learning” wasn’t coined in print until 1974 (Neufeld and Barrows 1974 ), and not by any of the founding fathers, goes to show just how uninterested the latter were in making grand jargonistic statements about what they were doing. A review of contemporary journal publications (Campbell 1973 ; Neufeld and Spaulding 1973 ; Spaulding and Neufeld 1973 ; Spaulding 1969 ) shows three things: firstly, that very little was published about PBL in its early years; secondly, that what was written tended to be by faculty who were not part of the original education committee; and thirdly, that the articles that were published tended to be descriptive rather than analytic. This meant that there was no definitive statement of what PBL was or what it was for, and when the founding fathers left the Education Committee—beginning with John Evans who resigned as Dean in 1972—the concept of PBL took on a life of its own under the pen of later prophets who filled the theoretical void with their own, often conflicting interpretations of what PBL was about.

The dispute at the heart of the division between the Problem-Solving Skills and the Knowledge Acquisition Approach is precisely the product of the theoretical chasm left by McMaster’s founders. This dispute played out in the late 1970s and 1980s between two of PBL’s most prolific theorists: Dr. Howard Barrows, a neurologist originally from California who came to McMaster on sabbatical in 1968 and joined the faculty roster from 1971 until 1981; and Henk Schmidt, a Dutch psychologist who was hired at the start of Maastricht University’s PBL programme in 1974 as part of the Department of Education Research and Development. The Maastricht programme was adapted from McMaster but sported some notable differences, such as the inclusion of systematic tutor and student training (Schmidt 1977a , b ), the development of a “skills lab” for clinical skills training (Bartholomeus 1977 ), the codification of the PBL method into seven steps (Schmidt et al. 1979 ), the use of biomedical problems rather than (only) patient cases (Schmidt et al. 1979 ), and the allocation of research funds for a Department of Educational Research and Development (Rijksuniversiteit Limburg 1972 ). Although this department was officially run by the psychologist and assessment specialist Dr. Wynand Wijnen, in practice most of the early research on PBL was done by Henk Schmidt and his colleague Peter Bouhuijs. Howard Barrows was an occasional visitor and advisor to Maastricht, and Schmidt an occasional guest at McMaster, but their divergence of perspective on PBL played out mostly on paper. Both authors wrote their first major book on PBL in 1980 (Barrows and Tamblyn 1980 ; Schmidt and Bouhuijs 1980 ), and by that time their academic differences had already crystallised into an unbridgeable epistemological gulf. This means that Barrows and Schmidt’s understanding of what knowledge is, how it is constructed and how it is used in problem-solving was not only different, but fundamentally contradictory, such that the two positions could not be reconciled in the middle—one cannot take both positions at once, as the next section will explain.

What is the difference between the problem-solving skills and the knowledge acquisition approach?

The crux of the intellectual dispute behind the two versions of PBL lies in two differing interpretations of what happens to the learner who is engaged in problem-based learning. On the one hand, some, led by Barrows, believed that the learners in PBL were honing “clinical reasoning skills” (Barrows and Tamblyn 1980 ) through a process called “hypothetico-deduction” (Elstein et al. 1978 ). We refer to this as the Problem-Solving Skills approach to PBL. Others, led by Schmidt, believed that learners in PBL were triggered by context-bound problems to understand the phenomena underlying the situation described in therein. We refer to this as the Knowledge Acquisition approach to PBL.

Both approaches are the product of the Cognitive Revolution in psychology, which began in 1956. The ‘50s were the heyday of behaviourism, but at an MIT symposium which brought together figures such as Jerome Bruner, Allen Newell, Herbert Simon and Noam Chomsky, a new interpretation of psychology was born that was based not on the study of behaviours and conditioning, but of mental processes instead (Miller 2003 ). While Bruner and Millers’ early work on cognition proceeded in relative isolation, the straw that broke the behaviourist camel’s back was Chomsky’s 1956 paper on linguistics (Chomsky 1956 , 1967 ); it demolished the behaviourist understanding of language acquisition by showing that a purely behavioural account could not explain grammar acquisition. Chomsky’s pioneering paper paved the way for what some regard as one of the first works of cognitive psychology: A Study of Thinking by Bruner, Goodnow and Austin, from 1956 (Bechtel et al. 2001 ; Bruner et al. 1956 ).

And yet, the very people who broke the hold of behaviourism on American psychology in 1956 were also the authors of a schism that divided cognitive psychology from its very beginnings until the 1990s. On the one hand, at the dawn of computer science, inspired by the workings of computer operating systems and refusing to believe that human problem-solving could be understood simply as trial-and-error, the two young computer scientists Newell and Simon ( 1972 ) produced a version of cognitive psychology that thought of people as general problem-solvers whose problem-solving skills were independent of their content knowledge; it became known as information-processing psychology (IPP). On the other hand, inspired by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget and his Schema Theory (Piaget 2003 ), authors initially rallying under Jerome Bruner’s banner developed a branch of cognitive psychology concerned with the role of the activation of existing knowledge in knowledge acquisition; this became known as constructivist psychology (Hergenhahn 2001 ). The division of the Cognitive Psychology movement into these two irreconcilable halves paved the way for the disagreement between Barrows and Schmidt.

Howard Barrows and the problem-solving skills approach to PBL

Although he may not have known it, Barrows owed the inspiration for his approach to PBL to the IPP school of thought. IPP was born in 1955, when Newell and Simon began their work in cognitive psychology from the premise that like computers, the human mind acts as a general problem-solving device (Newell et al. 1958 ). They believed that the process of solving a problem consisted in a collection of heuristic pathways that together formed a problem space and should be considered independently of the content of the problem. Newell and Simon’s research objective was to identify the invariant characteristics within the “Human Processing System” (Newell and Simon 1972 ).

While IPP was all the rage in the 1970s, by the 1980s it had hit an impasse. Firstly, from a methodological perspective, Newell and Simon’s trademark strategy for measuring the elusive “general problem-solving” capability was deeply flawed (Ohlsson 2012 ). It consisted in getting participants to voice their cognitive strategies out-loud while confronted with a sample problem. The experimenters recorded these verbal protocols, and then built computer programmes that mimicked the temporal order of the protocols in order to uncover the cognitive heuristics used by the human in this problem situation. However, there was a major problem with this approach: the verbal protocol was actually problem-specific rather than general—so much for their General Problem Solver . Secondly, from a theoretical perspective, the attempt to produce a general theory of problem solving didn’t work. Newell and Simon posited the existence of a problem-solving strategy that was context-free, but it became rapidly apparent that humans don’t generally engage in means-end analysis but use other cognitive strategies such as analogies, forward search etc., all of which are context-bound. And yet, perhaps because of psychology’s fascination with computers, the IPP model survived for decades longer than evidence should have allowed it to. Indeed, it survived long enough to spawn a model of medical problem-solving that ricocheted into the problem-based learning literature via Barrows: the hypothetico-deductive model.

The IPP methods were picked up by Arthur Elstein and Lee Shulman, working out of Michigan State University (Anderson 2003 ). In 1978, they attempted to demonstrate the existence of content-independent heuristics of medical problem-solving (Elstein et al. 1978 ). Clinicians, they conjectured, went through a process of hypothetico-deduction when faced with a medical problem. This meant that they would engage in the formulation of hypotheses for potential diagnoses, which would be either confirmed or disproved by new data from medical tests on the patient until the most likely hypothesis was left standing. The authors’ initial contention was that expert clinicians would fare better at hypothetico-deduction than novices, but their research found no evidence that expert clinicians were indeed better at generating hypotheses than novices. Instead, they were forced to acknowledge that the expert’s prior medical knowledge in the particular domain of the problem made a substantial difference in the expert clinicians’ ability to solve that problem, as compared with the novice. This indicated that the expertise was not one of deductive ability, but of content knowledge. However, the influence of IPP was such that they were not able to surrender the idea of the existence of content-independent heuristic processes. Instead of seeking a content-driven alternative explanation for the fact that some people appear to be better at problem-solving than others, they sought to explain this with the idea that some heuristics require extensive training.

The influence of the hypothetico-deductive model was then channelled into problem-based learning by Howard Barrows, particularly through his input into the McMaster curriculum in the 1970s and his 1980 book. Barrows began his research on hypothetico-deduction in the early 1970s, but his most developed argument in favour of content-independent reasoning processes can be found in Problem - based Learning: An Approach to Medical Education , the highly popular book on PBL which he co-authored with Robyn Tamblyn in 1980. In this book, the authors dismissed the idea that a physician’s clinical reasoning process was a mysterious intuitive “art”, and instead argued that these cognitive skills could and should be taught in medical education. The solution for this was to confront students with patient, health delivery, or research problems, since “by working with an unknown problem, the student is forced to develop problem-solving, diagnostic, or clinical reasoning skills” (p. 13).

Barrows argued that increased medical knowledge could even be detrimental to problem-solving skills as more precise knowledge might encourage students to tunnel-vision around what they had learned rather than consider a wider range of hypotheses. The distinction between content and process knowledge was cemented in Barrows’ call for process evaluations that are “concerned with the student’s ability to observe data, solve problems or show aspects of the clinical reasoning process, make clinical decisions and therapeutic decisions, and the like” (p. 113). Such aspects of the clinical reasoning process were made to include data perception and representation, problem formulation, hypothesis generation, inquiry strategy, diagnostic decisions, therapeutic decisions, time, cost, sequential management, and, finally, the medical information acquired. Therefore, while it would be unfair to claim that Barrows dismissed the importance of prior knowledge in problem-solving as Newell and Simon had, it is clear that the emphasis of his work was on the process of problem-solving via hypothesis generation. He believed that this process could be isolated enough from the specific problem content in which it was practiced to produce some general and teachable mechanisms by which medical problems should be approached; a trait which places Barrows squarely within the information-processing tradition.

This had some deep consequences for McMaster’s PBL curriculum. Beginning in 1977, calls were being issued by faculty and students to reform the 1969 curriculum (Roy 1978 ), and the process of change was taken over by Victor Neufeld, supported by Barrows. The new curriculum, progressively rolled out between 1977 and 1984, did away with the strong biomedical nature of the first curriculum and instead focused on priority healthcare problems management (MacDonald et al. 1989 ). Evidence of this change can be seen through the year-by-year evolution of the education materials found in the McMaster archives between 1975 and 1982, and in the notes of the Education Committee meetings (Ali 1977 ; Neufeld 1977 ) In the new curriculum, the students mainly dealt with long descriptions of patient cases compiled on the basis of lists of most commonly experienced medical issues, with a focus on solving the medical problem at hand. The objectives of the Faculty of Medicine were thus revised to read in top position: “to identify and define health problems at both an individual and a community level and to search for information to resolve or manage these problems” (Educational Programme Committee 1978 ). In addition, the development of clinical skills became a central feature of the reform efforts. Under the influence of Barrows and Tamblyn, the McMaster clinical skills training programme was constructed to train the students’ skills in encounters with simulated patients (Sutton 1977 ). This curriculum lasted until 1993, when, in the face of the high student failure rates in the national medical exam, McMaster abandoned the IPP approach and adopted a curriculum with many content-oriented features resembling those of Maastricht University (Norman et al. 2010 ).

Henk Schmidt and the knowledge acquisition approach to PBL

The Knowledge Acquisition position owes a lot to the early works of Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky. Although Schmidt was most strongly influenced by the renaissance of constructivist ideas in the wake of the cognitive revolution, that renaissance would not have been possible without the groundwork laid out by Piaget’s Schema Theory (Piaget 1952 , 1959 , 2003 ). Piaget was the first to propose that knowledge is not stored as raw data but “constructed” through particular mental structuring processes called “schemas”. Schema Theory fell out of favour with the dominance of behaviourism in the 1960s, but by the late 1970s, a growing number of experimental psychologists, such as Andrew Ortony, Rand Spiro and David Ausubel, were looking into information encoding and retrieval in an attempt to explain the way knowledge is stored and reconstructed for recall. Even though they seldom explicitly referred to Piaget, they expanded on his notion of the schema by providing it with the scientific specificity that the Swiss psychologist was lacking. Under their pen, schemas were understood as mental “frames” or “scripts” that contained “slots” or “placeholders” that could be “instantiated” by elements in a situation (Anderson et al. 1978 ). Although all of these names made their way into Schmidt’s research on PBL in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the work of Richard Anderson returned with more consistency and force than the others. Schmidt recalled:

What (PBL) students were doing while discussing a problem was activating prior-knowledge in order to make sense of that problem. If the problem was sufficiently complex (but adapted to their level of knowledge) the need for new knowledge would arise and self-directed learning would satisfy that need. Since relevant prior knowledge was already activated, the new information would be more easily integrated. That this indeed leads to better learning is what I have shown in my PhD-thesis published in 1982 (personal communication).

In 1977, Anderson expanded on the concepts of “assimilation” and “accommodation” in Schema Theory (Anderson 1977 ). He posited that schemas could not be a simple aggregation of response components, perceptual features, semantic features, functional attributes and the like – instead, schemas could only be understood in terms of their emergent properties. This insight enabled Anderson to hypothesise how schemas are used (assimilation) and change (accommodation). He argued that accommodation happens as a gradual process whereby incongruent elements increasingly challenge an existing schema and make assimilation more and more difficult. Although people are extremely reluctant to accommodate their schemas, they also attempt to preserve cognitive consistency, and when the latter tendency wins over and a schema change is engaged, the acquisition of knowledge truthfully begins. Thus, Anderson saw accommodation as a sine - qua - non condition of learning:

I suspect that large-scale accommodation may be a dialectical process which entails a confrontation with difficulties in one’s current schema and coming to appreciate the power of an alternative (p. 429).

Anderson’s explanation paved the way for Schmidt’s idea that problems, by offering realistic situations for students to work with, could activate students’ existing schemas and thus provide the basis for sense-making that is essential to learning (Schmidt 1983a , b ). The development of this theory was a slow process that began shortly after the opening of Maastricht Faculty of Medicine and ripened until 1983. We can see from archival evidence that the research efforts began in earnest in 1977, although at the time the education research group’s ideas on learning in PBL were a little haphazard. A note in the tutor training manual Het Tutorensysteem indicates that the researchers believed that the strength of PBL lay in the promotion of knowledge retention and transfer, but without further specification (Bouhuijs et al. 1977 ). In fact, the text indicates that the authors, including Schmidt and his colleague Peter Bouhuijs, were aware of the limitations of contemporary research in the field. By 1979, Schmidt had developed more precise ideas on this. He elaborated on his previous work with a paper entitled Leren met Problemen ( 1979 ) and for the first time referred to the activation of prior knowledge and Ausubel’s take on Schema Theory. At this point, Schmidt’s work was fully aligned with the constructivist credo that people do not passively ingest the outside world but instead constantly attempt to give meaning to it through personal interpretations of what their senses tell them. In a paper from 1983, he offered three connected explanations of the learning process that takes place in PBL: the activation of prior knowledge; encoding specificity (the similarity between the situation in which knowledge is learned and the situation is which it is applied); and elaboration of knowledge (Schmidt 1983a , b ). By this stage, his research had expanded well beyond the work of Anderson and Ausubel and was aggregating reports from all over the blooming field of cognitive psychology. Schmidt’s later article on the foundations of problem-based learning provided some elaborations of these three ideas, but the central themes remain the same to this day (Schmidt 1993 ).

How the dispute played out at Maastricht University

The story takes root in the early 1970s, when Howard Barrows took it upon himself to demonstrate that educational aids could be used to improve “clinical reasoning skills”, “problem-solving skills”, “diagnostic skills” and other variations thereof. The first apparent results of this research appeared in 1972, under the title The diagnostic (problem - solving) skill of the neurologist , in which it was claimed that hypothetico-deduction could be equated to a “cognitive hat rack” for organising the information acquired during the patient interview (Barrows and Bennett 1972 ). Barrows worked closely with Vic Neufeld on this research—neither of them having a prominent role in the curriculum development at McMaster at that time. Neufeld studied medical education at Michigan State University, where Elstein and Shulman were doing their work and according to their research assistant Geoffrey Norman, the Barrows-Neufeld duo “had a close relation” with the Elstein–Shulman team (personal communication). It is therefore unsurprising that Barrows borrowed so heavily from the theory of hypothetico-deduction to support his ideas. This research culminated in a paper written in 1977, in which not only was the “hat rack” idea alive and well, but prior knowledge was relegated to a secondary relevance (Feightner et al. 1977 ). They developed a model of medical problem solving which would be of crucial importance in the later debates on PBL (Fig.  1 ).

The hypothetico-deductive model of Feightner et al. ( 1977 )

The McMaster team boldly concluded: “Family physicians do have identifiable legitimate problem solving skills which they can teach. We feel that the model outlined above can help student to develop their clinical problem solving skills” (p. 71). These are the ideas with which Barrows and Neufeld travelled to Maastricht to act as educational consultants to the new Faculty of Medicine. There is ample evidence from written correspondence between them that throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Schmidt held both Barrows and Neufeld in very high esteem (Schmidt 1983a , b ). In Schmidt’s eyes, Barrows was one of the founders of PBL and therefore warranted listening to. It is therefore not surprising to find Barrows and Neufeld’s model of hypothetico-deduction in Schmidt’s early work. How did Schmidt move from one paradigm to the other? A comparison of his two major contributions between 1977 and 1979 may provide answers to this question. In 1977, Schmidt wrote Probleemgeoriënteerd onderwijs , a booklet designed to be used internally at the Faculty (Schmidt 1977a , b ). In it, he wrote down for the first time his ideas on the cognitive mechanisms underlying learning through PBL. This manuscript was published 1 year later in the Dutch journal Metamedica (Schmidt 1978 ), and 1 year later re-written in a substantially amended format as Leren met Problemen (Schmidt 1979 ). The key lies in the changes made between the 1977 paper (and its identical reprint in 1978) and the 1979 paper. The table below indicates the most significant of these changes. It may seem strange that Schmidt offered argument from both paradigms in his work, even though they are not epistemologically compatible—but this incompatibility was not generally understood at the time, even among cognitive scientists (Table  1 ).

We see in the 1977 paper an extensive explanation of PBL in terms of Barrows, Elstein and Shulman’s hypothetico-deductive model, with diagrams that closely resemble those published by Barrows in his own work from 1977. And yet, already in 1977, Schmidt was intrigued by the experiments of a Dutch psychologist, De Groot ( 1965 ), on chess players. De Groot had tested chess players’ ability to solve a checkers problem, and found that chess masters made mediocre checkers players—indicating the absence of a general problem-solving ability among chess masters. The plausible explanation was that chess masters had a great prior knowledge of possible chess combinations to draw from when solving chess problems, that was of no use to them when solving a checkers problem. Schmidt concluded, as Elstein also did later, that prior knowledge must be a major factor in performance on problem-solving tasks. But these ideas could only be considered hunches at the time: aside from a passing mention of Bruner, in 1977, Schmidt’s reference list is remarkably devoid of constructivist literature. This was very much amended in the 1979 paper, which is replete with notes on Ausubel, Kelly, De Groot, as well as digressions on Bruner and Miller. Although Schmidt had used the term “prior knowledge” before, this was the first time that he framed it strongly in terms of the “activation of prior knowledge”—and therefore PBL as a learning method that could be used precisely for that purpose. By 1979, gone were the references to hypothetico-deduction, absent the diagrams of Barrows–Schmidt now saw hypothesis generation as an automatic process of the human cognitive architecture which therefore cannot not be trained, and he therefore saw little point in expending energy researching it.

Incompatible approaches to PBL

Barrows and Schmidt were in regular contact during the 1980s as consultants from McMaster flew to Maastricht and vice versa. In particular, in 1983, Schmidt organised a symposium on PBL for which he invited Barrows as a speaker. A series of letter exchanges leading up to this event sheds some light on their academic relationship. For instance, a letter written by Barrows to Schmidt in July 1982 indicates that the former believed PBL to be the acquisition of basic sciences knowledge and “medical problem solving as a cognitive skill” in equal measure (Barrows 1982 ). In response, Schmidt returned a letter to Barrows in January 1983, in which he voiced in the clearest way possible the rift between their approaches to PBL:

I think that the difference between your work and mine is more a difference of problem-solving in terms of encoding, storage and retrieval of knowledge for use in problem-solving situations (and, most important, in terms of the organization of knowledge in memory), while you focus on the process of problem-solving itself. My main interest lies in the role PBL plays in knowledge acquisition - that is why I refer with emphasis to theories of learning (role of knowledge, inference production, organization of knowledge, retrieval cues etc.) - while you are particularly interested in how the students use the knowledge acquired in clinical problem-solving situations (and therefore refer to theory and research in that area). In fact, I think that our approaches are complementary. We would make a good team! When you are in Maastricht, we certainly should sit down to discuss these matters and others (Schmidt 1983a , b ).

In fact, it seems that the approaches were not so much complimentary as mutually exclusive as they relied on opposing understandings of the role of knowledge in problem-solving. The version of PBL supported by Barrows posited the primacy of heuristics and associations in medical problem-solving. That of Schmidt relied on problem-solving anchored in prior knowledge and experience. But problem-solving cannot be both content-independent and content-dependent—these two positions are therefore epistemologically incompatible with one another. Therefore either Barrows or Schmidt was right about PBL, but they could not both be. This incompatibility is not a matter of a historical clash of personalities: by all accounts, Schmidt and Barrows actually held each other in high regard. This is really a question of two interpretations of PBL, the underlying epistemological constructs of which are irreconcilable, and produced a very different type of problem in PBL. Whereas a PBL problem for Barrows could be “a written case, case vignette, standardized (also called simulated patient), computer simulation, video tape” (Barrows and Tamblyn 1980 , p. 5), for Schmidt, a problem could also look like a description of a biomedical phenomenon with no “solution”. Schmidt’s problems required instead that the underlying phenomena or theory be understood by the students (Schmidt 1993 ). While this sort of problem could be and was translated to almost any academic discipline, problems based on the management of healthcare problems could not be. Perhaps this serves to explain the profusion of PBL programmes in the Netherlands in all manner of academic disciplines ranging from psychology to liberal arts.

Luckily, History has provided us with some answers as to which of the two versions of PBL fared the best in terms of helping students to solve medical problems; by the mid-1980s, IPP was beginning to crumble as a psychological paradigm. In 1985, Christine McGuire lamented resilience of the idea of content-independent cognitive skills and abilities:

Professional evaluators (…) wanted to believe in the existence of some generalized kind of cognitive achievement – a related set of skills or developed abilities – that individuals could bring to bear in managing patient problems. They have been pursuing that chimera ever since, despite a mind-numbing torrent of studies that continue monotonously to report the same findings (McGuire, 1985 ).

McGuire also stated that she did not believe that the doctors reported in Barrows’ studies were actually engaging in hypothetico-deduction:

Doubts that these diagnostic labels are genuine hypotheses are considerably exacerbated if, as Barrows and Tamblyn say, they literally ‘pop’ into the clinician’s head within moments of the initial encounter. Such a process appears to be more akin to the act of pattern-matching or to the procedure involved in comparing group phenomena with various templates and selecting best fit (McGuire, 1985 ).

In what should have been a death blow to the Problem-Solving Skills approach to PBL, in 2002, Elstein became his own harshest critic when he acknowledged that the theory that medical problem-solving was based on hypothetico-deduction processes was in large part erroneous (Elstein and Schwarz 2002 ). Most problems, he realised, were actually resolved on the basis of pattern recognition or the construction of a mental model of the problem. Both of these processes were based on the extent of the clinician’s knowledge rather than the mastery of heuristics. This, he acknowledged, has such strong implications for problem-based learning that it led him to a re-evaluation of the purpose of the method:

The finding of case specificity showed the limits of teaching a general problem solving strategy. Expertise in problem solving can be separated from content analytically, but not in practice. This realisation shifted the emphasis towards helping students acquire a functional organisation of content with clinically usable schemas. This goal became the new rationale for problem based learning (p. 731).

This is not quite a full embrace of the constructivist paradigm, as Elstein struggled to let go of his embrace of IPP “analytically”. Yet ironically, “in practice”, Elstein turned to the alternative approach to PBL: constructivism and the Knowledge Acquisition approach championed by Henk Schmidt. And yet, despite these strong criticisms including from within the school of thought of hypothetico-deduction, Barrows refused to re-evaluate his approach to PBL. In the light of this, the divergence with Schmidt that had begun in the late 70s turned into a dispute in the late 1980s, culminating in an open confrontation during a review of the PBL curriculum of Sherbrooke University in Canada in 1992, as Schmidt recalls:

Howard Barrows, George Bordage, Charles Boelen (of the World Health Organization), and I were invited around 1992 to assess the then five-year old problem-based medical curriculum of the University of Sherbrooke in Canada. I had been one of this school’s consultants, had visited many times in the previous years, and had conducted teacher training workshops emphasizing PBL as a method to acquire knowledge and its embedding in cognitive constructivism. Barrows (perhaps not aware of my previous role) was highly critical about what had been accomplished, because the curriculum “was not a problem-solving curriculum”. Much more emphasis should be put on students acquiring the process of clinical reasoning, otherwise it was not really problem-based. I felt it necessary to object and eventually ended up in a heated argument with him (personal communication).

When asked, Georges Bordage and Charles Boelen could not remember the specifics of this particular event, but both agreed that Barrows, on different occasions, “was not too enthusiastic about knowledge-based PBL- too much about knowledge and not enough about the process of clinical reasoning, same issue” (Bordage, personal communication). Boelen recalled:

On another occasion at UNM in Albuquerque, I think in 1993, as we were considering with a dozen of colleagues PBL applied to public health problems, I remember him exposing very strongly the same arguments and the conversation became so heated that our friend Charles Engel [a PBL pioneer in Australia] who dared to argue was shocked and about to weep (personal communication).

If any doubt persists within the reader, an analysis of the later works of Barrows clearly show that he espoused information-processing to some degree until the end of his academic career, a claim also confirmed by his former research assistant Norman (personal communication). In 1996, Barrows produced a paper summarising his view of PBL in which he re-iterated the importance of clinical problem-solving skills, but also the importance of the acquisition of a medical knowledge-base that would be integrated, centred around the cues of patient problems, and enmeshed with the problem-solving process (Barrows 1996a , b ).

Until the end, Barrows and Schmidt retained two different understandings of the role of problems in PBL. Even though this debate was settled at Maastricht, it remains a major source of debate in PBL education and research around the world. As reported by Schmidt and colleagues, there are still many PBL curricula that follow the information-processing approach to PBL (Schmidt et al. 2009 ). In these curricula, PBL is still seen as a method for developing problem-solving skills rather than as a vehicle for understanding the underlying principles or mechanisms that produce these phenomena. These two interpretations are at such odds with one another that calling both of them “problem-based learning” tends to deprive PBL of its psychological and philosophical underpinnings and may leave only a methodological shell behind, devoid of theoretical support. From a historical perspective, declaring a victor in the dispute for the interpretation of PBL is a difficult matter. In terms of scientific consensus, the constructivist Maastricht interpretation of PBL, as the more theoretically-grounded approach can be awarded a clear academic victory: information-processing has largely been erased from the psychology of learning. But in terms of educational practice, educators from all over the world continue to preach the teaching of general problem-solving skills, so the turf-war for the interpretation of PBL is far from over.

Whilst as a historian, one would not purport to prescribe the application of historical lessons to the present day, one may very well encourage present day educators to seriously and extensively question the rationale behind their PBL curriculum: is it primarily grounded in information-processing or in constructivism, and is there a full and open understanding of the educational consequences that this implies?

This research was limited in scope to McMaster and Maastricht in the field of medical education, but there may be other disciplines and areas where the debate between IPP and constructivism played out. This may be worthwhile investigating. This being a historical paper, it has not investigated the present situation with regards to Problem-solving and Knowledge Acquisition curricula, including at McMaster and Maastricht; this may be an interesting exercise for follow-up research.

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Servant-Miklos, V.F.C. Problem solving skills versus knowledge acquisition: the historical dispute that split problem-based learning into two camps. Adv in Health Sci Educ 24 , 619–635 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10459-018-9835-0

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to assess Jared Diamond's theory about the environment or geography being the main determining factor for technological development and wealth in the modern world.  I ask students to identify the other theories about the cause of inequality in wealth that Diamond dismisses in favor of his own theory.  Next, I require students to decide provisionally if they find Diamond's theory more convincing than the racist ones he dismisses.  And, finally, we discuss if they think Diamond's theory will hold true for all of the states and peoples we will be discussing during the year.  For the eleven years I have taught this curriculum, students actively engage in debating the theories he dismisses as well as his theory and recall later in the year that this exercise opened their eyes to how theories can be applied to interpreting the past. , .  Guzman uses fairly simple language to demonstrate that barbarians got a bad reputation from ancient historians writing for "civilized" audiences. First, I ask students to predict if they will agree with Guzman's article based on his title.  Second, I ask students to repeat the method they used to figure out Diamond's interpretations by first identifying the arguments that Guzman rails against in the first two pages of his article.  Finally, students must assess Guzman's evidence for the causes of the pastoral migrations that led to conflict with sedentary states and empires.  On the basis of this exercise, students become a bit more sensitive to the use of words like "barbarian" and "civilized" throughout the rest of the course. .  After we have identified, simulated, and discussed the continuities and changes in the most active trade systems in the post-classical period up to about 1200 C.E. in the eastern hemisphere: Silk Roads, Indian Ocean routes, Trans-Saharan routes, Viking routes (west and east), as well as the Mediterranean routes, I give my students an excerpt from Abu-Lughod's introduction, some of her maps, and a few questions to lead them toward identifying how her historical interpretations are based in part on world-systems analysis.  To assess their skill of identifying historians' interpretation, I then give them two maps of trade routes from some world history textbooks that favor a more Mediterranean or European-dominant hemispheric trade system by the time of the Black Death and ask students if they think the cartographers accepted or rejected Abu-Lughod's work.  After this exercise, students begin to look at even the maps in their textbooks as examples of historical interpretation. .  I help students see how Hansen debunks the classic Western view of the "isolated" Chinese system through her exhaustive examples of open borders in China from the time of the Shang dynasty to 1600.  I give students a short quiz to make sure they can identify the arguments that Hansen challenges.  They then have to predict the reactions Hansen's book might get in 1965 from Chinese Communist Party leaders or American conservative news commentators compared to how government officials in those two countries today might view the concept of China being "isolated" in the past. , to help them distinguish between merchants breaking the law to make profits and thieves stealing goods or people.  Based on these background-building discussions, my students are prepared to predict what the historian Tonio Andrade will argue in his article "The Company's Chinese Pirates: How the Dutch East India Company Tried to Lead a Coalition of Pirates to War against China, 1621–1662".  Usually students can predict that Andrade will be arguing for a more complex view of pirates.  Although this conclusion about how Andrade will explain pirates' activities in the early modern period may seem obvious and trite to our experienced eyes, for my students it is an intellectual leap to read the article looking for Andrade's interpretation of pirates' roles in the early modern world rather than expecting the article to entertain or merely inform them. or you could use the articles in this free online journal.  For example, here are a few ideas on how to use the articles in the "Environment Forum" of this June 2011 issue to give students some experience with identifying historical interpretations [ Editor's note: at this author's suggestion, they have also been incorporated as means to explore the pedagogical value of the Forum on Environment in World History in this issue.]  teaches Advanced Placement World History and International Baccalaureate History at Springbrook High School in Silver Spring, Maryland.  She can be contacted at:    . New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Journal of World History 15, Number 4, (December 2004), . The Historian 50 (1988), 568–70 By Valerie Hansen. pp. ixx, 458. 17 maps, 70 illustrations. New York and London, W. W. Norton, 2000. . Rowan and Littlefield, 2009. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001.   | is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder. Table of Contents Random Entry Chronological Editorial Information About the SEP Editorial Board How to Cite the SEP Special Characters Advanced Tools Support the SEP PDFs for SEP Friends Make a Donation SEPIA for Libraries Back to Entry Entry Contents Entry Bibliography Academic Tools Friends PDF Preview Author and Citation Info Back to Top Supplement to Critical Thinking This supplement elaborates on the history of the articulation, promotion and adoption of critical thinking as an educational goal. John Dewey (1910: 74, 82) introduced the term ‘critical thinking’ as the name of an educational goal, which he identified with a scientific attitude of mind. More commonly, he called the goal ‘reflective thought’, ‘reflective thinking’, ‘reflection’, or just ‘thought’ or ‘thinking’. He describes his book as written for two purposes. The first was to help people to appreciate the kinship of children’s native curiosity, fertile imagination and love of experimental inquiry to the scientific attitude. The second was to help people to consider how recognizing this kinship in educational practice “would make for individual happiness and the reduction of social waste” (iii). He notes that the ideas in the book obtained concreteness in the Laboratory School in Chicago. Dewey’s ideas were put into practice by some of the schools that participated in the Eight-Year Study in the 1930s sponsored by the Progressive Education Association in the United States. For this study, 300 colleges agreed to consider for admission graduates of 30 selected secondary schools or school systems from around the country who experimented with the content and methods of teaching, even if the graduates had not completed the then-prescribed secondary school curriculum. One purpose of the study was to discover through exploration and experimentation how secondary schools in the United States could serve youth more effectively (Aikin 1942). Each experimental school was free to change the curriculum as it saw fit, but the schools agreed that teaching methods and the life of the school should conform to the idea (previously advocated by Dewey) that people develop through doing things that are meaningful to them, and that the main purpose of the secondary school was to lead young people to understand, appreciate and live the democratic way of life characteristic of the United States (Aikin 1942: 17–18). In particular, school officials believed that young people in a democracy should develop the habit of reflective thinking and skill in solving problems (Aikin 1942: 81). Students’ work in the classroom thus consisted more often of a problem to be solved than a lesson to be learned. Especially in mathematics and science, the schools made a point of giving students experience in clear, logical thinking as they solved problems. The report of one experimental school, the University School of Ohio State University, articulated this goal of improving students’ thinking: Critical or reflective thinking originates with the sensing of a problem. It is a quality of thought operating in an effort to solve the problem and to reach a tentative conclusion which is supported by all available data. It is really a process of problem solving requiring the use of creative insight, intellectual honesty, and sound judgment. It is the basis of the method of scientific inquiry. The success of democracy depends to a large extent on the disposition and ability of citizens to think critically and reflectively about the problems which must of necessity confront them, and to improve the quality of their thinking is one of the major goals of education. (Commission on the Relation of School and College of the Progressive Education Association 1943: 745–746) The Eight-Year Study had an evaluation staff, which developed, in consultation with the schools, tests to measure aspects of student progress that fell outside the focus of the traditional curriculum. The evaluation staff classified many of the schools’ stated objectives under the generic heading “clear thinking” or “critical thinking” (Smith, Tyler, & Evaluation Staff 1942: 35–36). To develop tests of achievement of this broad goal, they distinguished five overlapping aspects of it: ability to interpret data, abilities associated with an understanding of the nature of proof, and the abilities to apply principles of science, of social studies and of logical reasoning. The Eight-Year Study also had a college staff, directed by a committee of college administrators, whose task was to determine how well the experimental schools had prepared their graduates for college. The college staff compared the performance of 1,475 college students from the experimental schools with an equal number of graduates from conventional schools, matched in pairs by sex, age, race, scholastic aptitude scores, home and community background, interests, and probable future. They concluded that, on 18 measures of student success, the graduates of the experimental schools did a somewhat better job than the comparison group. The graduates from the six most traditional of the experimental schools showed no large or consistent differences. The graduates from the six most experimental schools, on the other hand, had much greater differences in their favour. The graduates of the two most experimental schools, the college staff reported: … surpassed their comparison groups by wide margins in academic achievement, intellectual curiosity, scientific approach to problems, and interest in contemporary affairs. The differences in their favor were even greater in general resourcefulness, in enjoyment of reading, [in] participation in the arts, in winning non-academic honors, and in all aspects of college life except possibly participation in sports and social activities. (Aikin 1942: 114) One of these schools was a private school with students from privileged families and the other the experimental section of a public school with students from non-privileged families. The college staff reported that the graduates of the two schools were indistinguishable from each other in terms of college success. In 1933 Dewey issued an extensively rewritten edition of his How We Think (Dewey 1910), with the sub-title “A restatement of the relation of reflective thinking to the educative process”. Although the restatement retains the basic structure and content of the original book, Dewey made a number of changes. He rewrote and simplified his logical analysis of the process of reflection, made his ideas clearer and more definite, replaced the terms ‘induction’ and ‘deduction’ by the phrases ‘control of data and evidence’ and ‘control of reasoning and concepts’, added more illustrations, rearranged chapters, and revised the parts on teaching to reflect changes in schools since 1910. In particular, he objected to one-sided practices of some “experimental” and “progressive” schools that allowed children freedom but gave them no guidance, citing as objectionable practices novelty and variety for their own sake, experiences and activities with real materials but of no educational significance, treating random and disconnected activity as if it were an experiment, failure to summarize net accomplishment at the end of an inquiry, non-educative projects, and treatment of the teacher as a negligible factor rather than as “the intellectual leader of a social group” (Dewey 1933: 273). Without explaining his reasons, Dewey eliminated the previous edition’s uses of the words ‘critical’ and ‘uncritical’, thus settling firmly on ‘reflection’ or ‘reflective thinking’ as the preferred term for his subject-matter. In the revised edition, the word ‘critical’ occurs only once, where Dewey writes that “a person may not be sufficiently critical about the ideas that occur to him” (1933: 16, italics in original); being critical is thus a component of reflection, not the whole of it. In contrast, the Eight-Year Study by the Progressive Education Association treated ‘critical thinking’ and ‘reflective thinking’ as synonyms. In the same period, Dewey collaborated on a history of the Laboratory School in Chicago with two former teachers from the school (Mayhew & Edwards 1936). The history describes the school’s curriculum and organization, activities aimed at developing skills, parents’ involvement, and the habits of mind that the children acquired. A concluding chapter evaluates the school’s achievements, counting as a success its staging of the curriculum to correspond to the natural development of the growing child. In two appendices, the authors describe the evolution of Dewey’s principles of education and Dewey himself describes the theory of the Chicago experiment (Dewey 1936). Glaser (1941) reports in his doctoral dissertation the method and results of an experiment in the development of critical thinking conducted in the fall of 1938. He defines critical thinking as Dewey defined reflective thinking: Critical thinking calls for a persistent effort to examine any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the evidence that supports it and the further conclusions to which it tends. (Glaser 1941: 6; cf. Dewey 1910: 6; Dewey 1933: 9) In the experiment, eight lesson units directed at improving critical thinking abilities were taught to four grade 12 high school classes, with pre-test and post-test of the students using the Otis Quick-Scoring Mental Ability Test and the Watson-Glaser Tests of Critical Thinking (developed in collaboration with Glaser’s dissertation sponsor, Goodwin Watson). The average gain in scores on these tests was greater to a statistically significant degree among the students who received the lessons in critical thinking than among the students in a control group of four grade 12 high school classes taking the usual curriculum in English. Glaser concludes: The aspect of critical thinking which appears most susceptible to general improvement is the attitude of being disposed to consider in a thoughtful way the problems and subjects that come within the range of one’s experience. An attitude of wanting evidence for beliefs is more subject to general transfer. Development of skill in applying the methods of logical inquiry and reasoning, however, appears to be specifically related to, and in fact limited by, the acquisition of pertinent knowledge and facts concerning the problem or subject matter toward which the thinking is to be directed. (Glaser 1941: 175) Retest scores and observable behaviour indicated that students in the intervention group retained their growth in ability to think critically for at least six months after the special instruction. In 1948 a group of U.S. college examiners decided to develop taxonomies of educational objectives with a common vocabulary that they could use for communicating with each other about test items. The first of these taxonomies, for the cognitive domain, appeared in 1956 (Bloom et al. 1956), and included critical thinking objectives. It has become known as Bloom’s taxonomy. A second taxonomy, for the affective domain (Krathwohl, Bloom, & Masia 1964), and a third taxonomy, for the psychomotor domain (Simpson 1966–67), appeared later. Each of the taxonomies is hierarchical, with achievement of a higher educational objective alleged to require achievement of corresponding lower educational objectives. Bloom’s taxonomy has six major categories. From lowest to highest, they are knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Within each category, there are sub-categories, also arranged hierarchically from the educationally prior to the educationally posterior. The lowest category, though called ‘knowledge’, is confined to objectives of remembering information and being able to recall or recognize it, without much transformation beyond organizing it (Bloom et al. 1956: 28–29). The five higher categories are collectively termed “intellectual abilities and skills” (Bloom et al. 1956: 204). The term is simply another name for critical thinking abilities and skills: Although information or knowledge is recognized as an important outcome of education, very few teachers would be satisfied to regard this as the primary or the sole outcome of instruction. What is needed is some evidence that the students can do something with their knowledge, that is, that they can apply the information to new situations and problems. It is also expected that students will acquire generalized techniques for dealing with new problems and new materials. Thus, it is expected that when the student encounters a new problem or situation, he will select an appropriate technique for attacking it and will bring to bear the necessary information, both facts and principles. This has been labeled “critical thinking” by some, “reflective thinking” by Dewey and others, and “problem solving” by still others. In the taxonomy, we have used the term “intellectual abilities and skills”. (Bloom et al. 1956: 38) Comprehension and application objectives, as their names imply, involve understanding and applying information. Critical thinking abilities and skills show up in the three highest categories of analysis, synthesis and evaluation. The condensed version of Bloom’s taxonomy (Bloom et al. 1956: 201–207) gives the following examples of objectives at these levels: analysis objectives : ability to recognize unstated assumptions, ability to check the consistency of hypotheses with given information and assumptions, ability to recognize the general techniques used in advertising, propaganda and other persuasive materials synthesis objectives : organizing ideas and statements in writing, ability to propose ways of testing a hypothesis, ability to formulate and modify hypotheses evaluation objectives : ability to indicate logical fallacies, comparison of major theories about particular cultures The analysis, synthesis and evaluation objectives in Bloom’s taxonomy collectively came to be called the “higher-order thinking skills” (Tankersley 2005: chap. 5). Although the analysis-synthesis-evaluation sequence mimics phases in Dewey’s (1933) logical analysis of the reflective thinking process, it has not generally been adopted as a model of a critical thinking process. While commending the inspirational value of its ratio of five categories of thinking objectives to one category of recall objectives, Ennis (1981b) points out that the categories lack criteria applicable across topics and domains. For example, analysis in chemistry is so different from analysis in literature that there is not much point in teaching analysis as a general type of thinking. Further, the postulated hierarchy seems questionable at the higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. For example, ability to indicate logical fallacies hardly seems more complex than the ability to organize statements and ideas in writing. A revised version of Bloom’s taxonomy (Anderson et al. 2001) distinguishes the intended cognitive process in an educational objective (such as being able to recall, to compare or to check) from the objective’s informational content (“knowledge”), which may be factual, conceptual, procedural, or metacognitive. The result is a so-called “Taxonomy Table” with four rows for the kinds of informational content and six columns for the six main types of cognitive process. The authors name the types of cognitive process by verbs, to indicate their status as mental activities. They change the name of the ‘comprehension’ category to ‘understand’ and of the ‘synthesis’ category to ’create’, and switch the order of synthesis and evaluation. The result is a list of six main types of cognitive process aimed at by teachers: remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create. The authors retain the idea of a hierarchy of increasing complexity, but acknowledge some overlap, for example between understanding and applying. And they retain the idea that critical thinking and problem solving cut across the more complex cognitive processes. The terms ‘critical thinking’ and ‘problem solving’, they write: are widely used and tend to become touchstones of curriculum emphasis. Both generally include a variety of activities that might be classified in disparate cells of the Taxonomy Table. That is, in any given instance, objectives that involve problem solving and critical thinking most likely call for cognitive processes in several categories on the process dimension. For example, to think critically about an issue probably involves some Conceptual knowledge to Analyze the issue. Then, one can Evaluate different perspectives in terms of the criteria and, perhaps, Create a novel, yet defensible perspective on this issue. (Anderson et al. 2001: 269–270; italics in original) In the revised taxonomy, only a few sub-categories, such as inferring, have enough commonality to be treated as a distinct critical thinking ability that could be taught and assessed as a general ability. A landmark contribution to philosophical scholarship on the concept of critical thinking was a 1962 article in the Harvard Educational Review by Robert H. Ennis, with the title “A concept of critical thinking: A proposed basis for research in the teaching and evaluation of critical thinking ability” (Ennis 1962). Ennis took as his starting-point a conception of critical thinking put forward by B. Othanel Smith: We shall consider thinking in terms of the operations involved in the examination of statements which we, or others, may believe. A speaker declares, for example, that “Freedom means that the decisions in America’s productive effort are made not in the minds of a bureaucracy but in the free market”. Now if we set about to find out what this statement means and to determine whether to accept or reject it, we would be engaged in thinking which, for lack of a better term, we shall call critical thinking. If one wishes to say that this is only a form of problem-solving in which the purpose is to decide whether or not what is said is dependable, we shall not object. But for our purposes we choose to call it critical thinking. (Smith 1953: 130) Adding a normative component to this conception, Ennis defined critical thinking as “the correct assessing of statements” (Ennis 1962: 83). On the basis of this definition, he distinguished 12 “aspects” of critical thinking corresponding to types or aspects of statements, such as judging whether an observation statement is reliable and grasping the meaning of a statement. He noted that he did not include judging value statements. Cutting across the 12 aspects, he distinguished three dimensions of critical thinking: logical (judging relationships between meanings of words and statements), criterial (knowledge of the criteria for judging statements), and pragmatic (the impression of the background purpose). For each aspect, Ennis described the applicable dimensions, including criteria. He proposed the resulting construct as a basis for developing specifications for critical thinking tests and for research on instructional methods and levels. In the 1970s and 1980s there was an upsurge of attention to the development of thinking skills. The annual International Conference on Critical Thinking and Educational Reform has attracted since its start in 1980 tens of thousands of educators from all levels. In 1983 the College Entrance Examination Board proclaimed reasoning as one of six basic academic competencies needed by college students (College Board 1983). Departments of education in the United States and around the world began to include thinking objectives in their curriculum guidelines for school subjects. For example, Ontario’s social sciences and humanities curriculum guideline for secondary schools requires “the use of critical and creative thinking skills and/or processes” as a goal of instruction and assessment in each subject and course (Ontario Ministry of Education 2013: 30). The document describes critical thinking as follows: Critical thinking is the process of thinking about ideas or situations in order to understand them fully, identify their implications, make a judgement, and/or guide decision making. Critical thinking includes skills such as questioning, predicting, analysing, synthesizing, examining opinions, identifying values and issues, detecting bias, and distinguishing between alternatives. Students who are taught these skills become critical thinkers who can move beyond superficial conclusions to a deeper understanding of the issues they are examining. They are able to engage in an inquiry process in which they explore complex and multifaceted issues, and questions for which there may be no clear-cut answers (Ontario Ministry of Education 2013: 46). Sweden makes schools responsible for ensuring that each pupil who completes compulsory school “can make use of critical thinking and independently formulate standpoints based on knowledge and ethical considerations” (Skolverket 2018: 12). Subject syllabi incorporate this requirement, and items testing critical thinking skills appear on national tests that are a required step toward university admission. For example, the core content of biology, physics and chemistry in years 7-9 includes critical examination of sources of information and arguments encountered by pupils in different sources and social discussions related to these sciences, in both digital and other media. (Skolverket 2018: 170, 181, 192). Correspondingly, in year 9 the national tests require using knowledge of biology, physics or chemistry “to investigate information, communicate and come to a decision on issues concerning health, energy, technology, the environment, use of natural resources and ecological sustainability” (see the message from the School Board ). Other jurisdictions similarly embed critical thinking objectives in curriculum guidelines. At the college level, a new wave of introductory logic textbooks, pioneered by Kahane (1971), applied the tools of logic to contemporary social and political issues. Popular contemporary textbooks of this sort include those by Bailin and Battersby (2016b), Boardman, Cavender and Kahane (2018), Browne and Keeley (2018), Groarke and Tindale (2012), and Moore and Parker (2020). In their wake, colleges and universities in North America transformed their introductory logic course into a general education service course with a title like ‘critical thinking’ or ‘reasoning’. In 1980, the trustees of California’s state university and colleges approved as a general education requirement a course in critical thinking, described as follows: Instruction in critical thinking is to be designed to achieve an understanding of the relationship of language to logic, which should lead to the ability to analyze, criticize, and advocate ideas, to reason inductively and deductively, and to reach factual or judgmental conclusions based on sound inferences drawn from unambiguous statements of knowledge or belief. The minimal competence to be expected at the successful conclusion of instruction in critical thinking should be the ability to distinguish fact from judgment, belief from knowledge, and skills in elementary inductive and deductive processes, including an understanding of the formal and informal fallacies of language and thought. (Dumke 1980) Since December 1983, the Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking has sponsored sessions at the three annual divisional meetings of the American Philosophical Association. In December 1987, the Committee on Pre-College Philosophy of the American Philosophical Association invited Peter Facione to make a systematic inquiry into the current state of critical thinking and critical thinking assessment. Facione assembled a group of 46 other academic philosophers and psychologists to participate in a multi-round Delphi process, whose product was entitled Critical Thinking: A Statement of Expert Consensus for Purposes of Educational Assessment and Instruction (Facione 1990a). The statement listed abilities and dispositions that should be the goals of a lower-level undergraduate course in critical thinking. Researchers in nine European countries determined which of these skills and dispositions employers expect of university graduates (Dominguez 2018 a), compared those expectations to critical thinking educational practices in post-secondary educational institutions (Dominguez 2018b), developed a course on critical thinking education for university teachers (Dominguez 2018c) and proposed in response to identified gaps between expectations and practices an “educational protocol” that post-secondary educational institutions in Europe could use to develop critical thinking (Elen et al. 2019). Copyright © 2022 by David Hitchcock < hitchckd @ mcmaster . ca > Accessibility Support SEP Mirror sites. View this site from another server: Info about mirror sites The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © 2024 by The Metaphysics Research Lab , Department of Philosophy, Stanford University Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054 Create new account Historians research, analyze, interpret, and write about the past by studying historical documents and sources. Historians typically do the following: Gather historical data from various sources, including archives, books, and artifacts Analyze and interpret historical information to determine its authenticity and significance Trace historical developments in a particular field Engage with the public through educational programs and presentations Archive or preserve materials and artifacts in museums, visitor centers, and historic sites Provide advice or guidance on historical topics and preservation issues Write reports, articles, and books on findings and theories Historians conduct research and analysis for governments, businesses, individuals, nonprofits, historical associations, and other organizations. They use a variety of sources in their work, including government and institutional records, newspapers, photographs, interviews, films, and unpublished manuscripts, such as personal diaries, letters, and other primary source documents. They also may process, catalog, and archive these documents and artifacts. Many historians present and interpret history in order to inform or build upon public knowledge of past events. They often trace and build a historical profile of a particular person, area, idea, organization, or event. Once their research is complete, they present their findings through articles, books, reports, exhibits, websites, and educational programs. In government, some historians conduct research to provide information on specific events or groups. Many write about the history of a particular government agency, activity, or program, such as a military operation or space missions. For example, they may research the people and events related to Operation Desert Storm. In historical associations, historians may work with archivists, curators, and museum workers to preserve artifacts and explain the historical significance of a wide variety of subjects, such as historic buildings, religious groups, and battlegrounds. Workers with a background in history also may go into one of these occupations. Many people with a degree in history also become high school teachers or postsecondary teachers. Historians held about 3,300 jobs in 2021. The largest employers of historians were as follows: Professional, scientific, and technical services 25% Federal government, excluding postal service 23 Local government, excluding education and hospitals          15 State government, excluding education and hospitals 15 Historians work in museums, archives, historical societies, and research organizations. Some work as consultants for these organizations while being employed by consulting firms, and some work as independent consultants. Work Schedules Most historians work full time during regular business hours. Some work independently and are able to set their own schedules. Historians who work in museums or other institutions open to the public may work evenings or weekends. Some historians may travel to collect artifacts, conduct interviews, or visit an area to better understand its culture and environment. Historians typically need at least a master’s degree to enter the occupation. Those with a bachelor’s degree in history may qualify for some entry-level positions, but most will find jobs in different fields. Historians typically need a master’s degree or Ph.D. to enter the occupation. Many historians have a master’s degree in history or public history. Others complete degrees in related fields, such as museum studies, historical preservation, or archival management. In addition to coursework, most master’s programs in public history and similar fields require an internship as part of the curriculum. Research positions in the federal government and positions in academia typically require a Ph.D. Students in history Ph.D. programs usually concentrate in a specific area of history. Possible specializations include a particular country or region, period, or field, such as social, political, or cultural history. Candidates with a bachelor’s degree in history may qualify for entry-level positions at museums, historical associations, or other small organizations. However, most bachelor’s degree holders usually work outside of traditional historian jobs—for example, jobs in education, communications, law, business, publishing, or journalism.   Other Experience Many employers recommend that prospective historians complete an internship during their formal educational studies. Internships offer an opportunity for students to learn practical skills, such as handling and preserving artifacts and creating exhibits. They also give students an opportunity to apply their academic knowledge in a hands-on setting. Historians typically have an interest in the Thinking interest area, according to the Holland Code framework. The Thinking interest area indicates a focus on researching, investigating, and increasing the understanding of natural laws. If you are not sure whether you have a Thinking interest which might fit with a career as a historian, you can take a career test to measure your interests. Historians should also possess the following specific qualities: Analytical skills. Historians must be able to examine the information and data in historical sources and draw logical conclusions from them, whether the sources are written documents, visual images, or material artifacts. Communication skills. Communication skills are important for historians because many give presentations on their historical specialty to the public. Historians also need communication skills when they interview people to collect oral histories, consult with clients, or collaborate with colleagues in the workplace. Problem-solving skills. Historians try to answer questions about the past. They may investigate something unknown about a past idea, event, or person; decipher historical information; or identify how the past has affected the present. Research skills. Historians must be able to examine and process information from a large number of historical documents, texts, and other sources. Writing skills. Writing skills are essential for historians as they often present their findings in reports, articles, and books. The median annual wage for historians was $63,940 in May 2021. The median wage is the wage at which half the workers in an occupation earned more than that amount and half earned less. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $37,310, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $118,380. In May 2021, the median annual wages for historians in the top industries in which they worked were as follows: Federal government, excluding postal service $101,910 Professional, scientific, and technical services 61,910 State government, excluding education and hospitals              51,460 Local government, excluding education and hospitals 45,940 Most historians work full time during standard business hours. Some work independently and are able to set their own schedules. Historians who work in museums or other institutions open to the public may work evenings or weekends. Some historians may travel to collect artifacts, conduct interviews, or visit an area to better understand its culture and environment. Employment of historians is projected to grow 4 percent from 2021 to 2031, about as fast as the average for all occupations. About 300 openings for historians are projected each year, on average, over the decade. Many of those openings are expected to result from the need to replace workers who transfer to different occupations or exit the labor force, such as to retire.  Organizations that employ historians, such as historical societies and government agencies, often depend on donations or public funding. Thus, employment growth will depend largely on the amount of funding available. For more information about historians, visit American Association for State and Local History American Historical Association National Council on Public History Organization of American Historians Where does this information come from? The career information above is taken from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook . This excellent resource for occupational data is published by the U.S. Department of Labor every two years. Truity periodically updates our site with information from the BLS database. I would like to cite this page for a report. Who is the author? There is no published author for this page. Please use citation guidelines for webpages without an author available.  I think I have found an error or inaccurate information on this page. Who should I contact? This information is taken directly from the Occupational Outlook Handbook published by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Truity does not editorialize the information, including changing information that our readers believe is inaccurate, because we consider the BLS to be the authority on occupational information. However, if you would like to correct a typo or other technical error, you can reach us at [email protected] . I am not sure if this career is right for me. How can I decide? There are many excellent tools available that will allow you to measure your interests, profile your personality, and match these traits with appropriate careers. On this site, you can take the Career Personality Profiler assessment, the Holland Code assessment, or the Photo Career Quiz . Get Our Newsletter How to List Problem-Solving Skills on a Resume [List Included] Problem-solving skills are more in-demand than ever.  Employers love candidates with problem-solving skills because, in 99% of cases, they guarantee you're also logical, creative, clear-headed, and a great decision-maker.  But claiming you have organizational skills on your resume is not enough.  To impress recruiters, you've got to prove that you possess them.  This includes understanding which problem-solving skills you possess and adding them to your resume (the right way), among other things. This is where this article comes in! We put together everything you need to know about problem-solving skills, including:  8 Essential Problem-Solving Skills for Your Resume How to Add Problem-Solving Skills to Your Resume Why Are Problem-Solving Skills Important 6 Problem-Solving Steps Let's dive right in!  8 Problem-Solving Skills for Your Resume Research shows that problem-solving skills consist of several facets :  Identifying and analyzing a problem Taking effective actions Understanding the effect of the decisions Coming up with creative and novel solutions Transferring knowledge from one situation to another Thinking abstractly about problems As such, there is no single problem-solving skill. Problem-solving includes a set of skills, all of which are equally important in helping your personal and professional life.  Below, we’ll cover the eight most important problem-solving skills that you can also list on your resume to impress recruiters:  #1. Research skills To properly identify and understand a problem, you need excellent research skills.  Research skills involve being able to gather information from the right sources, reviewing that information in detail to extract the data you need, analyzing the data according to the context, and being able to apply the data to your situation.  #2. Analytical skills Analytical skills are required throughout the entire process of solving a problem.  In a nutshell, analytical skills refer to being able to analyze a situation in depth and from different perspectives . Specifically, you need analytical skills to achieve all of the following while solving a problem: Detect patterns Interpret data Analyze new information Reach conclusions based on several factors #3. Creativity Being creative means being able to think outside of the box and look at situations and problems inventively.  For most people, creativity is mainly associated with creative industries such as arts and crafts, architecture, design, etc.  In reality, however, creativity is an essential success factor for every job and the data is here to support that. According to this Adobe study , problem-solving (51%) and creativity (47%) have gained the most value in driving salary increases in the last five years.  When it comes to the process of solving a problem, creativity can help you consider more perspectives, think abstractly about problems, and come up with novel solutions that others haven’t thought of before. #4. Critical thinking skills Being able to think critically means that you’re good at rationalizing, understanding the connections between ideas or situations, and logically analyzing any given situation.  As such, strong critical thinking skills can help you see beyond what’s at face value, make more informed decisions, and anticipate the outcomes of said decisions.  People who have critical thinking skills share traits such as open-mindedness , cognitive flexibility , skepticism , clarity , and precision .  #5. Decision-making skills Before coming up with a single action plan to solve a problem, you’ll need to first brainstorm several possible solutions.  After that, you need good decision-making skills to choose the best possible solution. Without decision-making skills, you risk prolonging finding a proper solution or aggravating a problem even more.  #6. Communication skills With strong communication skills , you’re able to successfully explain the problem to others and propose your solutions. In turn, you can be sure that everyone’s on the same page and that you’re carrying out the action plan accordingly.  Some communication skills required for problem-solving include:  Active listening Written and verbal communication Giving and receiving feedback #7. Collaboration Problem-solving is rarely a process you carry out alone. More often than not, you need to consult relevant stakeholders, give and receive feedback, and work with a team towards a common goal (i.e. solving the problem). Well, collaboration entails exactly that - working well with others, cooperatively addressing problems, and putting a group’s goal ahead of personal goals.  Some important collaboration skills that help with problem-solving include:  Conflict resolution Emotional intelligence  #8. Attention to Detail  Have you ever heard of the expression “the devil’s in the details?” It means that something may seem simple on the surface, but in fact, the details make it complicated and are likely to cause problems. Well, if you’re someone who shows great attention to detail, you’re not likely to let details keep you from solving a problem effectively.  Not to mention, being able to spot and understand even the smallest details that make up a problem means you’ll be able to grasp the issue in its entire complexity and come up with even more inventive and workable solutions.  Now that we covered the most important problem-solving skills, we’ll show you how to add them to your resume so that you can stand out from other candidates.  Let us walk you through the process, step-by-step:  #1. Mention Your Problem-Solving Skills on Your Resume Summary The resume summary is a three or four-sentence paragraph positioned at the top of your resume that includes:  Your profession and years of experience  Your top skills (i.e. hard skills or soft skills) One or two noteworthy achievements  The goal of the resume summary is to catch the hiring manager’s attention, show them you’re a relevant candidate and get them to go through the rest of your resume in detail.  As such, it’s your first chance to highlight your problem-solving skills effectively. You can either do that by mentioning them among your top skills or by mentioning an achievement that proves you possess a given skill. In the best-case scenario, you can even do both.  Here is an example of how you can include problem-solving skills in your resume summary:  Behavioral psychologist with 7+ years of experience in the field. Great research, analytical, and communication skills. Over the last eight years, I’ve worked closely with more than 100 patients with different behavioral disorders, helping them improve their personal and professional lives through different treatment methods.  #2. Add the RIGHT Problem-Solving Skills Under Your Soft Skills Secondly, you should list your problem-solving skills under your resume’s soft skills section .  The listing part is pretty easy - simply create a section titled Skills and write down your problem-solving skills. There is, however, one caveat:  You don’t want to overkill your skills section by listing every problem-solving skill we covered in this article. Not only will the hiring manager have trouble believing you possess each and every skill, but there’s also a high chance you don’t even need all those skills to begin with.  To make your skills section as relevant as possile, do the following:  Check the job description. The job description can show you exactly what skills you need for the job. If you’re applying for, say, a software engineering position, you’ll probably be required to have the following problem-solving skills: analytical skills, creativity, attention to detail, and cognitive flexibility.  Identify the skills you possess. Think about which skills you can back up with actual experience from your previous jobs. Only list problem-solving skills that you actually possess and that you can prove you possess on your resume.  Add those skills under your soft skills. Then, add the problem-solving skills that you have and that are required in the job under your resume’s “Soft Skills” section.  #3. Prove Your Problem-Solving Skills In Your Work Experience Section Finally, you should use the work experience section to prove that you’ve got the problem-solving skills you’ve mentioned throughout your resume.  Anyone can just claim that they’ve got problem-solving skills on their resume - not everyone can back them up with experience. Here’s what you can do to convey that you possess problem-solving skills and also make your work experience section as impactful as possible:  Tailor your work experience to the job. Only add past jobs that are relevant to the position you are applying for now. If you’re applying for, say, a software engineering position, the hiring manager will be interested in your previous jobs in the field, but probably not too interested in the time you worked as a server at a restaurant.  Focus on your achievements instead of your responsibilities. More often than not, hiring managers know exactly what your responsibilities consisted of in previous jobs. What they want to know is how you made a positive impact with your achievements.  Make your achievements quantifiable. Speaking of achievements, you want to make them as quantifiable as possible. After all “treated ten patients in the course of a year using positive reinforcement” sounds much better than “treated ten patients.” Use the Laszlo Bock formula . If you’re having trouble phrasing your achievements, the following formula will probably be of help: “Accomplished X as measured by Y doing X.”  Leverage action verbs and keywords. There are hundreds of words and verbs you can use instead of “did,” “accomplished,” etc. The more descriptive you are of your achievements, the more impressive they can sound. And here’s an example of a project manager describing their problem-solving skills in their work experience section: Fixed company communication issues by implementing a new project management solution.  Improved team productivity by implementing time-tracking software and doing daily stand-up calls. Managed to meet all client deliverable deadlines in 2022. Why Are Problem-Solving Skills Important? Are you wondering what exactly is it that makes problem-solving skills so important?  After all, there are hundreds of soft skills out there that you can master, improve, or learn how to add to your resume. So it’s normal to wonder “why should I focus on problem-solving?”  Here is why problem-solving skills matter: They can improve your employability. Problem-solving skills are among the most important skills to employers across a range of occupations. In short, employers are always looking for proactive thinkers who can address professional challenges. They can help you grow in your career more easily. You’ll be more likely to get promoted if you can come up with creative solutions to the different problems that you’ll face throughout your career. They can become an essential part of your personal brand . Your current employer, coworkers, and future employers alike will see you as someone creative, reliable, and helpful. They are related to a range of other valuable skills. When you prove you’re a problem solver, you’re effectively saying you’re attentive to detail, logical, creative, analytical, curious, and other things employers are looking for in their employees. 10 Jobs That Require Problem-Solving Skills As we’ve already mentioned, problem-solving skills come in handy for practically every job.  Whether you’re a teacher who needs to solve a dispute between peers in your class or a customer representative who needs to help a client, knowing how to go about solving issues is definitely an asset.  That said, some jobs are all about solving problems. In such cases, problem-solving skills are not just a nice addition to have on your resume - they’re crucial to getting hired.  Here are the top 10 jobs requiring problem-solving skills in 2024:  Software engineer Air-traffic controller Police officer Social worker Psychologist UX designer 35 Action Verbs You Can Use to Highlight Your Problem-Solving Skills The language you use to describe your problem-solving skills matters.   Sure, you can use “ solved” to describe how you dealt with a problem throughout your entire resume and risk coming off as repetitive and unimaginative.  Or , you can use any of the following action verbs and keywords and make your problem-solving skills pop out in the eyes of recruiters:  Calculate   Critically think  Draw conclusions Experiment  Listen/Listen actively  The Problem-Solving Process in 6 Steps Problem-solving is a methodical process. It consists of certain steps that you always need to take if you want to find a good solution.  The more you understand and practice this process, the better you can get at solving problems.  Below, we cover the six main steps of problem-solving in detail: #1. Identify the problem  The first step to solving a problem is identifying exactly what’s causing it.  After all, if you’re not focusing on the real underlying issue, you might come up with solutions that don’t fit the problem itself.  Say, for example, that you’re a teacher that’s facing poor class performance. Identifying whether the problem comes from the students’ not studying enough or from your own teaching methods can make a big difference in the solutions you come up with.  It typically happens that the faster you find the root cause of the problem, the easier it is to find a proper solution.  #2. Understand the problem Once you identify the problem, you’ve got to understand it completely. Here are some questions you can ask to make sure you properly understand a problem:  What is the scale of the problem?  What are its short and long-term effects?  Have you faced something like this before? Can the problem be solved by dividing it into smaller parts? The better you understand the problem in its complexity, the more likely you are to come up with effective solutions.  #3. Research the systems that make up the problem  In many cases, solving a problem will be a complex undertaking. See, complex problems are often the result of several different underlying systems that you need to understand to find a dynamic solution.  Let’s take the teacher example from above.  If a certain student is not doing too well and keeps getting poor grades, you might be tempted to go the easy route and simply chastise them and tell them to study more. This, in a lot of cases, might simply not work because you’re not addressing the root cause of the problem. The student might, for example, be burned out , unmotivated by the curriculum, or simply struggling with specific topics. A problem-solving solution that’s more likely to work would be to talk to the student (or their parents), try to understand the reason for their poor grades, and address the root cause behind the problem itself. #4. Visualize the problem  This may not apply to all situations, but it can definitely come in handy for most.  Drawing a diagram to visualize the situation or your solution to the problem can help you grasp its complexity better - especially if the problem is multi-faceted. Anything from PowerPoint to a piece of white paper can be a good tool to visualize your problem, highlight the problem area, and tackle it more effectively. #5. Brainstorm solutions  After you’ve done all the above, it’s time to start thinking about solutions.  This is another step of the problem-solving process that’s based on collaboration and effective communication. In the brainstorming phase, you should sit with team members or relevant stakeholders and come up with as many creative ideas and solutions as possible.  This is not where you come up with your most refined, well-thought-out ideas. Instead, it’s where you discuss freely and combine diverse knowledge and analysis of the problem to come up with diverse solutions.  Brainstorming is an essential part of problem-solving that can help you break out of boring or predictable ideas and thinking patterns.  #6. Choose the best answer(s) This is where decision-making skills come in. With a list of different potential solutions, you can narrow down your options to finally choose the best one.  To reach a solution more easily, take the following into consideration: Your company’s/organization’s objectives The budget and the timeframe at your disposal The success outcomes Potential risks linked to the solution  Finally, discuss your solutions with relevant stakeholders and team members to gather all the possible feedback that can help you make the best possible decision.  And remember - once you’ve chosen the best possible solution to a problem, your work is far from over. Being a problem solver also includes the following:  Develop and implement an action plan Monitor the progress of your plan  Make necessary adjustments during the process Evaluate the outcomes of your solution  Problem-Solving Skills Resume Example Want a resume that makes your problem-solving skills pop like the above example?  Use one of our tried-and-tested resume templates .  They’re free, modern, and created in collaboration with some of the best HR professionals from around the globe! Key Takeaways  And that's a wrap on problem-solving skills. By now, you should know everything there is to know on the topic.  Before you go, here are the main points we covered in this article:  Problem-solving skills are a set of soft skills that help you solve problems effectively. They involve critical thinking, analytical skills, creativity, communication skills, and attention to detail.  Problem-solving skills can improve your employability, work performance, and personal brand.  Add your problem-solving skills to your resume summary, under the soft skills section, and in your work history section.  When you’re creating your work history section, make sure to tailor it to the job, focus on your achievements and make them quantifiable, and use action verbs and keywords from the job description.  To get better at solving problems, follow these steps: identify and understand the problem, research the systems that make up the problem, visualize the problem, brainstorm, and choose the best possible solution.  Once that’s done, create an action plan and make sure to monitor its progress as you’re implementing it.  To provide a safer experience, the best content and great communication, we use cookies. Learn how we use them for non-authenticated users. 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Advanced Search Journal List Problem solving skills versus knowledge acquisition: the historical dispute that split problem-based learning into two camps Virginie f. c. servant-miklos. 1 Aalborg University, Rendsburggade 14, 9000 Aalborg, Denmark 2 Erasmus University College, Nieuwemarkt 1A, 3011 HP Rotterdam, The Netherlands This paper sheds light on an intellectual dispute on the purpose of problem-based learning that took place in the 1970s between two major figures in the history of PBL: Howard S Barrows from McMaster University and Henk Schmidt from Maastricht University. Using historical evidence from archive materials, oral history accounts and contemporary publications, the paper shows that at the core of the dispute was their divergent understanding of cognitive psychology. On the one hand, Barrows espoused hypothetico-deduction, and on the other, Henk Schmidt was a proponent of constructivism. The paper shows how the dispute played out both in the scientific literature and in the divergent practice of PBL at McMaster and Maastricht and continues to affect the way PBL is done today. Introduction In 2009, Schmidt et al. ( 2009 ) acknowledged that there was not one but several types of problem-based learning curricula being used by medical schools in North America and beyond. Primarily, they distinguished between what they called Type 1 curricula, in which students are asked to generate a “mental model” of phenomena underlying a problem, and a Type 2, in which students “play doctor”, focusing on problem-solving and clinical reasoning skills. For the sake of simplicity, we shall refer to the former as the Knowledge Acquisition model, and the latter as the Problem-Solving Skills model. What Schmidt and colleagues did not explain is how, issued from a single source, namely McMaster University Medical School’s 1969 pioneering programme, the world of PBL came to be divided along this fault-line. The beginnings of PBL were recently the subject of extensive research and shall not be covered in detail here (Servant 2016 ). The story can be summarised as follows: in the period after the second World War, higher education experienced an unparalleled growth around the western world, which, combined with bountiful financial resources and a rising tide of anti-authoritarianism, contributed to the birth and development of many innovative higher education programmes in various disciplines. In Germany and Denmark, problem-oriented education grounded in critical theory emerged in social sciences and humanities, and later engineering, as a challenge to mainstream didactics (Servant-Miklos and Spliid 2017 ); in business education, the Harvard Case Method gained international traction (Garvin 2003 ); in medical education, Western Reserve University pioneered an organ systems-based approach, a direct ancestor to PBL (Williams 1980 ). Between 1966 and 1972 a group of creative Canadian medical educators assembled around McMaster Medical School’s founding Dean Dr. John Evans with the mission to start a new undergraduate medical education programme. They took the medical education world by storm when instead of opening a traditional school, they decided to develop a small-group, self-directed, problem-based learning curriculum (Spaulding 1991 ). Their students began their learning with biomedical problems under the guidance of a tutor who acted as a process guide rather than a lecturer, leaving students to do most of the studying in their own time (Spaulding 1968 ). By the time of Schmidt’s article, over 500 medical schools were using some form of PBL (Moust et al. 2007 ), the majority using the Problem-Solving Skills version, and a substantial minority the Knowledge Acquisition version. This division is interesting considering the substantial support that the latter position has gained in the scientific literature, often at the expense of the former—a support that this paper will surely reinforce. How did these two iterations emerge from the McMaster experiment? What is the difference between these two versions, and how does this play out in terms of the way PBL is conducted? Why does this difference matter for medical education? Using historical data from oral history interviews, archives from McMaster University and Maastricht University and contemporary publications, this paper will try to answer these questions and shed light on a little known but highly significant divide in medical education. The research for this paper was done using an inductive and hermeneutic approach to historical data in provenance from three types of primary sources that were triangulated to make sense of the historical events and the meanings ascribed to them by those who experienced them. These three sources were oral history accounts from primary witnesses, who were interviewed in English on site at McMaster and Maastricht Universities; archival records from McMaster University, Maastricht University, the Rijksarchief in Limburg and the private collections of former teachers, students and managers and both institutions, and contemporary publications and out-of-print books and journals that were acquired via the second-hand market or directly from the authors. Events, their meanings and interpretations were given weight according to how many independent sources could support the interpretation. Where a conflict emerged between the recollections of a witness in an oral history account and a written record, the written record was given precedence unless there was overwhelming oral historical evidence to the contrary. In writing this paper, the focus was on interpreting and analysing an important historical development rather than on providing a descriptive history of what happened at McMaster and Maastricht. Why did two iterations of PBL emerge from the original McMaster model? To understand how two different interpretation of PBL emerged from the original experiment at McMaster, it is important to understand that the 1969 McMaster programme was not designed as a realisation of educational theory principles, as has often been claimed. The five founding fathers of PBL at McMaster University were pioneers and innovators, but not education theorists. In 1966, Dr. John Evans drafted a one-page bullet-pointed list of ideas which became the founding principles of PBL, but he never wrote anything significant to justify his choice of items for the list (Evans 1966 ). The list read as follows: “The Following is an outline of the objectives for the McMaster M.D. Programme as expressed in terms of knowledge, abilities and attitudes that McMaster would like a graduate of the programme to have acquired or developed: The ability to identify and define health problems, and search for information to resolve or manage these problems. Given a health problem, to examine the underlying physical or behavioural mechanisms. […] The ability to recognize, maintain and develop personal characteristics and attitudes required for professional life […] The clinical skills and methods required to define and manage health problems of patients, including their physical, emotional and social aspects. The ability to become a self-directed learner, recognizing personal education needs, selecting appropriate learning resources and evaluating progress. To assess professional activity, both personal and that of other health professionals To function as a productive member of a small group, which is engaged in learning, research or healthcare. To be aware of and able to work in a variety of health care settings.” As far as we know, his main source of inspiration was the Flexner report (McAuley 1979 ), but extracting from this anything more than general statements about the outdatedness of lecture-based medical education would be a stretch. Evans’ right-hand man Bill Spaulding occasionally mused about the 16th Century humanist Johannes Comenius (Spaulding 1968 ), but Spaulding’s role as the Chair of McMaster’s Education Committee was more that of a nuts-and-bolt planner than an education philosopher. Jim Anderson, possibly the most creative of the founding fathers, may have been inspired by humanistic principles, but he was really an inspired anatomist, not an education psychologist (Barrows 1996a , b ). Neither of the final two members of the Education Committee—Fraser Mustard and Bill Walsh—had read much beyond what was widely circulating in higher education circles at the time; namely Mager’s Behaviour Objectives (Mager 1962 ) and the work of Knowles on self-directed learning (Knowles 1975 ). The lack of strong and coherent theoretical underpinnings for the programme meant that the McMaster experiment was more of a trial-and-error process in constant development than an application of cleverly crafted educational ideas. The fact that the term “problem-based learning” wasn’t coined in print until 1974 (Neufeld and Barrows 1974 ), and not by any of the founding fathers, goes to show just how uninterested the latter were in making grand jargonistic statements about what they were doing. A review of contemporary journal publications (Campbell 1973 ; Neufeld and Spaulding 1973 ; Spaulding and Neufeld 1973 ; Spaulding 1969 ) shows three things: firstly, that very little was published about PBL in its early years; secondly, that what was written tended to be by faculty who were not part of the original education committee; and thirdly, that the articles that were published tended to be descriptive rather than analytic. This meant that there was no definitive statement of what PBL was or what it was for, and when the founding fathers left the Education Committee—beginning with John Evans who resigned as Dean in 1972—the concept of PBL took on a life of its own under the pen of later prophets who filled the theoretical void with their own, often conflicting interpretations of what PBL was about. The dispute at the heart of the division between the Problem-Solving Skills and the Knowledge Acquisition Approach is precisely the product of the theoretical chasm left by McMaster’s founders. This dispute played out in the late 1970s and 1980s between two of PBL’s most prolific theorists: Dr. Howard Barrows, a neurologist originally from California who came to McMaster on sabbatical in 1968 and joined the faculty roster from 1971 until 1981; and Henk Schmidt, a Dutch psychologist who was hired at the start of Maastricht University’s PBL programme in 1974 as part of the Department of Education Research and Development. The Maastricht programme was adapted from McMaster but sported some notable differences, such as the inclusion of systematic tutor and student training (Schmidt 1977a , b ), the development of a “skills lab” for clinical skills training (Bartholomeus 1977 ), the codification of the PBL method into seven steps (Schmidt et al. 1979 ), the use of biomedical problems rather than (only) patient cases (Schmidt et al. 1979 ), and the allocation of research funds for a Department of Educational Research and Development (Rijksuniversiteit Limburg 1972 ). Although this department was officially run by the psychologist and assessment specialist Dr. Wynand Wijnen, in practice most of the early research on PBL was done by Henk Schmidt and his colleague Peter Bouhuijs. Howard Barrows was an occasional visitor and advisor to Maastricht, and Schmidt an occasional guest at McMaster, but their divergence of perspective on PBL played out mostly on paper. Both authors wrote their first major book on PBL in 1980 (Barrows and Tamblyn 1980 ; Schmidt and Bouhuijs 1980 ), and by that time their academic differences had already crystallised into an unbridgeable epistemological gulf. This means that Barrows and Schmidt’s understanding of what knowledge is, how it is constructed and how it is used in problem-solving was not only different, but fundamentally contradictory, such that the two positions could not be reconciled in the middle—one cannot take both positions at once, as the next section will explain. What is the difference between the problem-solving skills and the knowledge acquisition approach? The crux of the intellectual dispute behind the two versions of PBL lies in two differing interpretations of what happens to the learner who is engaged in problem-based learning. On the one hand, some, led by Barrows, believed that the learners in PBL were honing “clinical reasoning skills” (Barrows and Tamblyn 1980 ) through a process called “hypothetico-deduction” (Elstein et al. 1978 ). We refer to this as the Problem-Solving Skills approach to PBL. Others, led by Schmidt, believed that learners in PBL were triggered by context-bound problems to understand the phenomena underlying the situation described in therein. We refer to this as the Knowledge Acquisition approach to PBL. Both approaches are the product of the Cognitive Revolution in psychology, which began in 1956. The ‘50s were the heyday of behaviourism, but at an MIT symposium which brought together figures such as Jerome Bruner, Allen Newell, Herbert Simon and Noam Chomsky, a new interpretation of psychology was born that was based not on the study of behaviours and conditioning, but of mental processes instead (Miller 2003 ). While Bruner and Millers’ early work on cognition proceeded in relative isolation, the straw that broke the behaviourist camel’s back was Chomsky’s 1956 paper on linguistics (Chomsky 1956 , 1967 ); it demolished the behaviourist understanding of language acquisition by showing that a purely behavioural account could not explain grammar acquisition. Chomsky’s pioneering paper paved the way for what some regard as one of the first works of cognitive psychology: A Study of Thinking by Bruner, Goodnow and Austin, from 1956 (Bechtel et al. 2001 ; Bruner et al. 1956 ). And yet, the very people who broke the hold of behaviourism on American psychology in 1956 were also the authors of a schism that divided cognitive psychology from its very beginnings until the 1990s. On the one hand, at the dawn of computer science, inspired by the workings of computer operating systems and refusing to believe that human problem-solving could be understood simply as trial-and-error, the two young computer scientists Newell and Simon ( 1972 ) produced a version of cognitive psychology that thought of people as general problem-solvers whose problem-solving skills were independent of their content knowledge; it became known as information-processing psychology (IPP). On the other hand, inspired by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget and his Schema Theory (Piaget 2003 ), authors initially rallying under Jerome Bruner’s banner developed a branch of cognitive psychology concerned with the role of the activation of existing knowledge in knowledge acquisition; this became known as constructivist psychology (Hergenhahn 2001 ). The division of the Cognitive Psychology movement into these two irreconcilable halves paved the way for the disagreement between Barrows and Schmidt. Howard Barrows and the problem-solving skills approach to PBL Although he may not have known it, Barrows owed the inspiration for his approach to PBL to the IPP school of thought. IPP was born in 1955, when Newell and Simon began their work in cognitive psychology from the premise that like computers, the human mind acts as a general problem-solving device (Newell et al. 1958 ). They believed that the process of solving a problem consisted in a collection of heuristic pathways that together formed a problem space and should be considered independently of the content of the problem. Newell and Simon’s research objective was to identify the invariant characteristics within the “Human Processing System” (Newell and Simon 1972 ). While IPP was all the rage in the 1970s, by the 1980s it had hit an impasse. Firstly, from a methodological perspective, Newell and Simon’s trademark strategy for measuring the elusive “general problem-solving” capability was deeply flawed (Ohlsson 2012 ). It consisted in getting participants to voice their cognitive strategies out-loud while confronted with a sample problem. The experimenters recorded these verbal protocols, and then built computer programmes that mimicked the temporal order of the protocols in order to uncover the cognitive heuristics used by the human in this problem situation. However, there was a major problem with this approach: the verbal protocol was actually problem-specific rather than general—so much for their General Problem Solver . Secondly, from a theoretical perspective, the attempt to produce a general theory of problem solving didn’t work. Newell and Simon posited the existence of a problem-solving strategy that was context-free, but it became rapidly apparent that humans don’t generally engage in means-end analysis but use other cognitive strategies such as analogies, forward search etc., all of which are context-bound. And yet, perhaps because of psychology’s fascination with computers, the IPP model survived for decades longer than evidence should have allowed it to. Indeed, it survived long enough to spawn a model of medical problem-solving that ricocheted into the problem-based learning literature via Barrows: the hypothetico-deductive model. The IPP methods were picked up by Arthur Elstein and Lee Shulman, working out of Michigan State University (Anderson 2003 ). In 1978, they attempted to demonstrate the existence of content-independent heuristics of medical problem-solving (Elstein et al. 1978 ). Clinicians, they conjectured, went through a process of hypothetico-deduction when faced with a medical problem. This meant that they would engage in the formulation of hypotheses for potential diagnoses, which would be either confirmed or disproved by new data from medical tests on the patient until the most likely hypothesis was left standing. The authors’ initial contention was that expert clinicians would fare better at hypothetico-deduction than novices, but their research found no evidence that expert clinicians were indeed better at generating hypotheses than novices. Instead, they were forced to acknowledge that the expert’s prior medical knowledge in the particular domain of the problem made a substantial difference in the expert clinicians’ ability to solve that problem, as compared with the novice. This indicated that the expertise was not one of deductive ability, but of content knowledge. However, the influence of IPP was such that they were not able to surrender the idea of the existence of content-independent heuristic processes. Instead of seeking a content-driven alternative explanation for the fact that some people appear to be better at problem-solving than others, they sought to explain this with the idea that some heuristics require extensive training. The influence of the hypothetico-deductive model was then channelled into problem-based learning by Howard Barrows, particularly through his input into the McMaster curriculum in the 1970s and his 1980 book. Barrows began his research on hypothetico-deduction in the early 1970s, but his most developed argument in favour of content-independent reasoning processes can be found in Problem - based Learning: An Approach to Medical Education , the highly popular book on PBL which he co-authored with Robyn Tamblyn in 1980. In this book, the authors dismissed the idea that a physician’s clinical reasoning process was a mysterious intuitive “art”, and instead argued that these cognitive skills could and should be taught in medical education. The solution for this was to confront students with patient, health delivery, or research problems, since “by working with an unknown problem, the student is forced to develop problem-solving, diagnostic, or clinical reasoning skills” (p. 13). Barrows argued that increased medical knowledge could even be detrimental to problem-solving skills as more precise knowledge might encourage students to tunnel-vision around what they had learned rather than consider a wider range of hypotheses. The distinction between content and process knowledge was cemented in Barrows’ call for process evaluations that are “concerned with the student’s ability to observe data, solve problems or show aspects of the clinical reasoning process, make clinical decisions and therapeutic decisions, and the like” (p. 113). Such aspects of the clinical reasoning process were made to include data perception and representation, problem formulation, hypothesis generation, inquiry strategy, diagnostic decisions, therapeutic decisions, time, cost, sequential management, and, finally, the medical information acquired. Therefore, while it would be unfair to claim that Barrows dismissed the importance of prior knowledge in problem-solving as Newell and Simon had, it is clear that the emphasis of his work was on the process of problem-solving via hypothesis generation. He believed that this process could be isolated enough from the specific problem content in which it was practiced to produce some general and teachable mechanisms by which medical problems should be approached; a trait which places Barrows squarely within the information-processing tradition. This had some deep consequences for McMaster’s PBL curriculum. Beginning in 1977, calls were being issued by faculty and students to reform the 1969 curriculum (Roy 1978 ), and the process of change was taken over by Victor Neufeld, supported by Barrows. The new curriculum, progressively rolled out between 1977 and 1984, did away with the strong biomedical nature of the first curriculum and instead focused on priority healthcare problems management (MacDonald et al. 1989 ). Evidence of this change can be seen through the year-by-year evolution of the education materials found in the McMaster archives between 1975 and 1982, and in the notes of the Education Committee meetings (Ali 1977 ; Neufeld 1977 ) In the new curriculum, the students mainly dealt with long descriptions of patient cases compiled on the basis of lists of most commonly experienced medical issues, with a focus on solving the medical problem at hand. The objectives of the Faculty of Medicine were thus revised to read in top position: “to identify and define health problems at both an individual and a community level and to search for information to resolve or manage these problems” (Educational Programme Committee 1978 ). In addition, the development of clinical skills became a central feature of the reform efforts. Under the influence of Barrows and Tamblyn, the McMaster clinical skills training programme was constructed to train the students’ skills in encounters with simulated patients (Sutton 1977 ). This curriculum lasted until 1993, when, in the face of the high student failure rates in the national medical exam, McMaster abandoned the IPP approach and adopted a curriculum with many content-oriented features resembling those of Maastricht University (Norman et al. 2010 ). Henk Schmidt and the knowledge acquisition approach to PBL The Knowledge Acquisition position owes a lot to the early works of Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky. Although Schmidt was most strongly influenced by the renaissance of constructivist ideas in the wake of the cognitive revolution, that renaissance would not have been possible without the groundwork laid out by Piaget’s Schema Theory (Piaget 1952 , 1959 , 2003 ). Piaget was the first to propose that knowledge is not stored as raw data but “constructed” through particular mental structuring processes called “schemas”. Schema Theory fell out of favour with the dominance of behaviourism in the 1960s, but by the late 1970s, a growing number of experimental psychologists, such as Andrew Ortony, Rand Spiro and David Ausubel, were looking into information encoding and retrieval in an attempt to explain the way knowledge is stored and reconstructed for recall. Even though they seldom explicitly referred to Piaget, they expanded on his notion of the schema by providing it with the scientific specificity that the Swiss psychologist was lacking. Under their pen, schemas were understood as mental “frames” or “scripts” that contained “slots” or “placeholders” that could be “instantiated” by elements in a situation (Anderson et al. 1978 ). Although all of these names made their way into Schmidt’s research on PBL in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the work of Richard Anderson returned with more consistency and force than the others. Schmidt recalled: What (PBL) students were doing while discussing a problem was activating prior-knowledge in order to make sense of that problem. If the problem was sufficiently complex (but adapted to their level of knowledge) the need for new knowledge would arise and self-directed learning would satisfy that need. Since relevant prior knowledge was already activated, the new information would be more easily integrated. That this indeed leads to better learning is what I have shown in my PhD-thesis published in 1982 (personal communication). In 1977, Anderson expanded on the concepts of “assimilation” and “accommodation” in Schema Theory (Anderson 1977 ). He posited that schemas could not be a simple aggregation of response components, perceptual features, semantic features, functional attributes and the like – instead, schemas could only be understood in terms of their emergent properties. This insight enabled Anderson to hypothesise how schemas are used (assimilation) and change (accommodation). He argued that accommodation happens as a gradual process whereby incongruent elements increasingly challenge an existing schema and make assimilation more and more difficult. Although people are extremely reluctant to accommodate their schemas, they also attempt to preserve cognitive consistency, and when the latter tendency wins over and a schema change is engaged, the acquisition of knowledge truthfully begins. Thus, Anderson saw accommodation as a sine - qua - non condition of learning: I suspect that large-scale accommodation may be a dialectical process which entails a confrontation with difficulties in one’s current schema and coming to appreciate the power of an alternative (p. 429). Anderson’s explanation paved the way for Schmidt’s idea that problems, by offering realistic situations for students to work with, could activate students’ existing schemas and thus provide the basis for sense-making that is essential to learning (Schmidt 1983a , b ). The development of this theory was a slow process that began shortly after the opening of Maastricht Faculty of Medicine and ripened until 1983. We can see from archival evidence that the research efforts began in earnest in 1977, although at the time the education research group’s ideas on learning in PBL were a little haphazard. A note in the tutor training manual Het Tutorensysteem indicates that the researchers believed that the strength of PBL lay in the promotion of knowledge retention and transfer, but without further specification (Bouhuijs et al. 1977 ). In fact, the text indicates that the authors, including Schmidt and his colleague Peter Bouhuijs, were aware of the limitations of contemporary research in the field. By 1979, Schmidt had developed more precise ideas on this. He elaborated on his previous work with a paper entitled Leren met Problemen ( 1979 ) and for the first time referred to the activation of prior knowledge and Ausubel’s take on Schema Theory. At this point, Schmidt’s work was fully aligned with the constructivist credo that people do not passively ingest the outside world but instead constantly attempt to give meaning to it through personal interpretations of what their senses tell them. In a paper from 1983, he offered three connected explanations of the learning process that takes place in PBL: the activation of prior knowledge; encoding specificity (the similarity between the situation in which knowledge is learned and the situation is which it is applied); and elaboration of knowledge (Schmidt 1983a , b ). By this stage, his research had expanded well beyond the work of Anderson and Ausubel and was aggregating reports from all over the blooming field of cognitive psychology. Schmidt’s later article on the foundations of problem-based learning provided some elaborations of these three ideas, but the central themes remain the same to this day (Schmidt 1993 ). How the dispute played out at Maastricht University The story takes root in the early 1970s, when Howard Barrows took it upon himself to demonstrate that educational aids could be used to improve “clinical reasoning skills”, “problem-solving skills”, “diagnostic skills” and other variations thereof. The first apparent results of this research appeared in 1972, under the title The diagnostic (problem - solving) skill of the neurologist , in which it was claimed that hypothetico-deduction could be equated to a “cognitive hat rack” for organising the information acquired during the patient interview (Barrows and Bennett 1972 ). Barrows worked closely with Vic Neufeld on this research—neither of them having a prominent role in the curriculum development at McMaster at that time. Neufeld studied medical education at Michigan State University, where Elstein and Shulman were doing their work and according to their research assistant Geoffrey Norman, the Barrows-Neufeld duo “had a close relation” with the Elstein–Shulman team (personal communication). It is therefore unsurprising that Barrows borrowed so heavily from the theory of hypothetico-deduction to support his ideas. This research culminated in a paper written in 1977, in which not only was the “hat rack” idea alive and well, but prior knowledge was relegated to a secondary relevance (Feightner et al. 1977 ). They developed a model of medical problem solving which would be of crucial importance in the later debates on PBL (Fig.  1 ). The hypothetico-deductive model of Feightner et al. ( 1977 ) The McMaster team boldly concluded: “Family physicians do have identifiable legitimate problem solving skills which they can teach. We feel that the model outlined above can help student to develop their clinical problem solving skills” (p. 71). These are the ideas with which Barrows and Neufeld travelled to Maastricht to act as educational consultants to the new Faculty of Medicine. There is ample evidence from written correspondence between them that throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Schmidt held both Barrows and Neufeld in very high esteem (Schmidt 1983a , b ). In Schmidt’s eyes, Barrows was one of the founders of PBL and therefore warranted listening to. It is therefore not surprising to find Barrows and Neufeld’s model of hypothetico-deduction in Schmidt’s early work. How did Schmidt move from one paradigm to the other? A comparison of his two major contributions between 1977 and 1979 may provide answers to this question. In 1977, Schmidt wrote Probleemgeoriënteerd onderwijs , a booklet designed to be used internally at the Faculty (Schmidt 1977a , b ). In it, he wrote down for the first time his ideas on the cognitive mechanisms underlying learning through PBL. This manuscript was published 1 year later in the Dutch journal Metamedica (Schmidt 1978 ), and 1 year later re-written in a substantially amended format as Leren met Problemen (Schmidt 1979 ). The key lies in the changes made between the 1977 paper (and its identical reprint in 1978) and the 1979 paper. The table below indicates the most significant of these changes. It may seem strange that Schmidt offered argument from both paradigms in his work, even though they are not epistemologically compatible—but this incompatibility was not generally understood at the time, even among cognitive scientists (Table  1 ). Table 1 Information processing versus constructivist content in Schmidt ( 1977a , 1979 ) Title, date of paper These are the observations that Schmidt made pertaining to the information processing paradigm These are the observations that Schmidt made pertaining to the constructivist paradigm (1977) (1) Schmidt made reference to computer-simulations as latest advances in cognitive sciences (2) Schmidt used Barrows and Tamblyn ( ) model of clinical reasoning with hypothesis generation (3) Schmidt cited a belief that problem-solving is the “transformation of a problem into a solution by - .” (4) Schmidt argued that problem-solving can mean the through which a solution can be brought forward even if the underlying mechanisms are not fully known (5) Schmidt claimed that the central advantage of PBL is the training of - and promotion of thinking processes IPP References in Schmidt’s bibliography: Barrows and Mitchell ( ), Barrows and Tamblyn ( ), Feightner et al. ( ), Elstein et al. ( ), Gorry ( ) (a) Schmidt interpreted Elstein (1972) as indicating importance of prior experience for medical problem solving (b) Schmidt recognized the work of De Groot (though he did not reference it) in demonstrating that good chess players make poor doctors due to the importance of (c) Schmidt proposed that PBL is about understanding the of phenomena Constructivist references in Schmidt’s bibliography: Bruner et al. ( ) (1979) (6) Schmidt argued that students and doctors generate hypotheses automatically, in the same way. This is not a skills that can trained or improved independently of content. IPP References in Schmidt’s bibliography: Barrows ( ) (d) Schmidt argued that the of prior knowledge through self-study allows students to “fill up” relevant cognitive structures (e) Schmidt stated that internal representation of knowledge is a construction and interpretation of reality (f) He further stated that these constructions are tested against reality, people make theories based on knowledge, test them, then make other theories Constructivist references in Schmidt’s bibliography: Ausubel ( ), Bruner ( ), Bruner et al. ( ), de Groot ( ), Kelly ( ), Miller ( ) We see in the 1977 paper an extensive explanation of PBL in terms of Barrows, Elstein and Shulman’s hypothetico-deductive model, with diagrams that closely resemble those published by Barrows in his own work from 1977. And yet, already in 1977, Schmidt was intrigued by the experiments of a Dutch psychologist, De Groot ( 1965 ), on chess players. De Groot had tested chess players’ ability to solve a checkers problem, and found that chess masters made mediocre checkers players—indicating the absence of a general problem-solving ability among chess masters. The plausible explanation was that chess masters had a great prior knowledge of possible chess combinations to draw from when solving chess problems, that was of no use to them when solving a checkers problem. Schmidt concluded, as Elstein also did later, that prior knowledge must be a major factor in performance on problem-solving tasks. But these ideas could only be considered hunches at the time: aside from a passing mention of Bruner, in 1977, Schmidt’s reference list is remarkably devoid of constructivist literature. This was very much amended in the 1979 paper, which is replete with notes on Ausubel, Kelly, De Groot, as well as digressions on Bruner and Miller. Although Schmidt had used the term “prior knowledge” before, this was the first time that he framed it strongly in terms of the “activation of prior knowledge”—and therefore PBL as a learning method that could be used precisely for that purpose. By 1979, gone were the references to hypothetico-deduction, absent the diagrams of Barrows–Schmidt now saw hypothesis generation as an automatic process of the human cognitive architecture which therefore cannot not be trained, and he therefore saw little point in expending energy researching it. Incompatible approaches to PBL Barrows and Schmidt were in regular contact during the 1980s as consultants from McMaster flew to Maastricht and vice versa. In particular, in 1983, Schmidt organised a symposium on PBL for which he invited Barrows as a speaker. A series of letter exchanges leading up to this event sheds some light on their academic relationship. For instance, a letter written by Barrows to Schmidt in July 1982 indicates that the former believed PBL to be the acquisition of basic sciences knowledge and “medical problem solving as a cognitive skill” in equal measure (Barrows 1982 ). In response, Schmidt returned a letter to Barrows in January 1983, in which he voiced in the clearest way possible the rift between their approaches to PBL: I think that the difference between your work and mine is more a difference of problem-solving in terms of encoding, storage and retrieval of knowledge for use in problem-solving situations (and, most important, in terms of the organization of knowledge in memory), while you focus on the process of problem-solving itself. My main interest lies in the role PBL plays in knowledge acquisition - that is why I refer with emphasis to theories of learning (role of knowledge, inference production, organization of knowledge, retrieval cues etc.) - while you are particularly interested in how the students use the knowledge acquired in clinical problem-solving situations (and therefore refer to theory and research in that area). In fact, I think that our approaches are complementary. We would make a good team! When you are in Maastricht, we certainly should sit down to discuss these matters and others (Schmidt 1983a , b ). In fact, it seems that the approaches were not so much complimentary as mutually exclusive as they relied on opposing understandings of the role of knowledge in problem-solving. The version of PBL supported by Barrows posited the primacy of heuristics and associations in medical problem-solving. That of Schmidt relied on problem-solving anchored in prior knowledge and experience. But problem-solving cannot be both content-independent and content-dependent—these two positions are therefore epistemologically incompatible with one another. Therefore either Barrows or Schmidt was right about PBL, but they could not both be. This incompatibility is not a matter of a historical clash of personalities: by all accounts, Schmidt and Barrows actually held each other in high regard. This is really a question of two interpretations of PBL, the underlying epistemological constructs of which are irreconcilable, and produced a very different type of problem in PBL. Whereas a PBL problem for Barrows could be “a written case, case vignette, standardized (also called simulated patient), computer simulation, video tape” (Barrows and Tamblyn 1980 , p. 5), for Schmidt, a problem could also look like a description of a biomedical phenomenon with no “solution”. Schmidt’s problems required instead that the underlying phenomena or theory be understood by the students (Schmidt 1993 ). While this sort of problem could be and was translated to almost any academic discipline, problems based on the management of healthcare problems could not be. Perhaps this serves to explain the profusion of PBL programmes in the Netherlands in all manner of academic disciplines ranging from psychology to liberal arts. Luckily, History has provided us with some answers as to which of the two versions of PBL fared the best in terms of helping students to solve medical problems; by the mid-1980s, IPP was beginning to crumble as a psychological paradigm. In 1985, Christine McGuire lamented resilience of the idea of content-independent cognitive skills and abilities: Professional evaluators (…) wanted to believe in the existence of some generalized kind of cognitive achievement – a related set of skills or developed abilities – that individuals could bring to bear in managing patient problems. They have been pursuing that chimera ever since, despite a mind-numbing torrent of studies that continue monotonously to report the same findings (McGuire, 1985 ). McGuire also stated that she did not believe that the doctors reported in Barrows’ studies were actually engaging in hypothetico-deduction: Doubts that these diagnostic labels are genuine hypotheses are considerably exacerbated if, as Barrows and Tamblyn say, they literally ‘pop’ into the clinician’s head within moments of the initial encounter. Such a process appears to be more akin to the act of pattern-matching or to the procedure involved in comparing group phenomena with various templates and selecting best fit (McGuire, 1985 ). In what should have been a death blow to the Problem-Solving Skills approach to PBL, in 2002, Elstein became his own harshest critic when he acknowledged that the theory that medical problem-solving was based on hypothetico-deduction processes was in large part erroneous (Elstein and Schwarz 2002 ). Most problems, he realised, were actually resolved on the basis of pattern recognition or the construction of a mental model of the problem. Both of these processes were based on the extent of the clinician’s knowledge rather than the mastery of heuristics. This, he acknowledged, has such strong implications for problem-based learning that it led him to a re-evaluation of the purpose of the method: The finding of case specificity showed the limits of teaching a general problem solving strategy. Expertise in problem solving can be separated from content analytically, but not in practice. This realisation shifted the emphasis towards helping students acquire a functional organisation of content with clinically usable schemas. This goal became the new rationale for problem based learning (p. 731). This is not quite a full embrace of the constructivist paradigm, as Elstein struggled to let go of his embrace of IPP “analytically”. Yet ironically, “in practice”, Elstein turned to the alternative approach to PBL: constructivism and the Knowledge Acquisition approach championed by Henk Schmidt. And yet, despite these strong criticisms including from within the school of thought of hypothetico-deduction, Barrows refused to re-evaluate his approach to PBL. In the light of this, the divergence with Schmidt that had begun in the late 70s turned into a dispute in the late 1980s, culminating in an open confrontation during a review of the PBL curriculum of Sherbrooke University in Canada in 1992, as Schmidt recalls: Howard Barrows, George Bordage, Charles Boelen (of the World Health Organization), and I were invited around 1992 to assess the then five-year old problem-based medical curriculum of the University of Sherbrooke in Canada. I had been one of this school’s consultants, had visited many times in the previous years, and had conducted teacher training workshops emphasizing PBL as a method to acquire knowledge and its embedding in cognitive constructivism. Barrows (perhaps not aware of my previous role) was highly critical about what had been accomplished, because the curriculum “was not a problem-solving curriculum”. Much more emphasis should be put on students acquiring the process of clinical reasoning, otherwise it was not really problem-based. I felt it necessary to object and eventually ended up in a heated argument with him (personal communication). When asked, Georges Bordage and Charles Boelen could not remember the specifics of this particular event, but both agreed that Barrows, on different occasions, “was not too enthusiastic about knowledge-based PBL- too much about knowledge and not enough about the process of clinical reasoning, same issue” (Bordage, personal communication). Boelen recalled: On another occasion at UNM in Albuquerque, I think in 1993, as we were considering with a dozen of colleagues PBL applied to public health problems, I remember him exposing very strongly the same arguments and the conversation became so heated that our friend Charles Engel [a PBL pioneer in Australia] who dared to argue was shocked and about to weep (personal communication). If any doubt persists within the reader, an analysis of the later works of Barrows clearly show that he espoused information-processing to some degree until the end of his academic career, a claim also confirmed by his former research assistant Norman (personal communication). In 1996, Barrows produced a paper summarising his view of PBL in which he re-iterated the importance of clinical problem-solving skills, but also the importance of the acquisition of a medical knowledge-base that would be integrated, centred around the cues of patient problems, and enmeshed with the problem-solving process (Barrows 1996a , b ). Until the end, Barrows and Schmidt retained two different understandings of the role of problems in PBL. Even though this debate was settled at Maastricht, it remains a major source of debate in PBL education and research around the world. As reported by Schmidt and colleagues, there are still many PBL curricula that follow the information-processing approach to PBL (Schmidt et al. 2009 ). In these curricula, PBL is still seen as a method for developing problem-solving skills rather than as a vehicle for understanding the underlying principles or mechanisms that produce these phenomena. These two interpretations are at such odds with one another that calling both of them “problem-based learning” tends to deprive PBL of its psychological and philosophical underpinnings and may leave only a methodological shell behind, devoid of theoretical support. From a historical perspective, declaring a victor in the dispute for the interpretation of PBL is a difficult matter. In terms of scientific consensus, the constructivist Maastricht interpretation of PBL, as the more theoretically-grounded approach can be awarded a clear academic victory: information-processing has largely been erased from the psychology of learning. But in terms of educational practice, educators from all over the world continue to preach the teaching of general problem-solving skills, so the turf-war for the interpretation of PBL is far from over. Whilst as a historian, one would not purport to prescribe the application of historical lessons to the present day, one may very well encourage present day educators to seriously and extensively question the rationale behind their PBL curriculum: is it primarily grounded in information-processing or in constructivism, and is there a full and open understanding of the educational consequences that this implies? This research was limited in scope to McMaster and Maastricht in the field of medical education, but there may be other disciplines and areas where the debate between IPP and constructivism played out. This may be worthwhile investigating. 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Ashley Michelle Boles , Liberty University Follow School of Education Doctor of Philosophy in Education (PhD) Mary Strickland problem-based learning, medical education, higher-order thinking and processing, critical thinking, clinical reasoning, problem-solving, clinical field experiences Disciplines Education | Medicine and Health Sciences Recommended Citation Boles, Ashley Michelle, "Exploring Student Perceptions of Problem-Based Learning and Clinical Field Experiences: A Phenomenological Study" (2024). Doctoral Dissertations and Projects . 5866. https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/doctoral/5866 The purpose of this phenomenological study is to understand the experiences of participating in a physical therapy course primarily taught using problem-based learning teaching methods for Doctor of Physical Therapy students at a university in the mid-western United States. This study aimed to understand student perception of PBL and its effects on clinical field experiences (CFEs), specifically related to higher-order processing skills. The theory guiding this study was the social constructivism theory as it explains how knowledge acquisition and learning occurs through social interactions during problem-based learning activities. The central research question this study attempted to answer was: What were the experiences of DPT students who participate in a PBL education? This study design was a qualitative, hermeneutic phenomenological study. Convenience sampling was done from a pool of DPT students at a university in the midwestern United States. Data collection methods included journal prompts, individual interviews, and focus groups. Data analysis was based on van Manen’s data analysis methods. Findings reveal DPT students preferred PBL over traditional teaching methods and felt the use of PBL improved their higher-order thinking and processing skills. Participants felt that PBL teaching methods were conducive to their learning as the method allowed for real-time feedback and a perception of better content retention. DPT students also felt that using PBL teaching methods improved their ability to prioritize and funnel information to organize information in a way conducive to developing a solution to the problem. Participants felt that the problem-solving, critical thinking, and clinical reasoning they developed during the therapeutic exercise course did carry over into their ability to apply these higher-order thinking and processing skills during CFEs. Since August 09, 2024 Included in Education Commons , Medicine and Health Sciences Commons Collections Faculty Expert Gallery Theses and Dissertations Conferences and Events Open Educational Resources (OER) Explore Disciplines Advanced Search Notify me via email or RSS . Faculty Authors Submit Research Expert Gallery Login Student Authors Undergraduate Submissions Graduate Submissions Honors Submissions Home | About | FAQ | My Account | Accessibility Statement Privacy Copyright 402 COMMENTS 6 Teaching Undergraduate History: A Problem-Based Approach Identifying and Using Core Elements of Historical Inquiry In creating learning environments where students become historians, it is necessary to consider what it is that historians do and what skills are necessary to be practitioners of the discipline. In a macro sense, many historians describe their work as problem solving guided by active questioning (Elton, 1967; Fischer, 1970; Marius and ... 3 Questions: How history helps us solve today's issues Professor Malick Ghachem discusses how historians contribute to problem-solving by identifying the roots and sources of a problem. Problem Solving Like a Historian Historians also use their problem solving skill to find answers to questions they have about the past. But historians solve problems in a particular way: they investigate sources that contain information about the topic they're studying so they can come up with the best possible answers. PDF Rethinking Historical Thinking: How Historians Use Unreliable Evidence s designed to address two topics related to the idea of evidence use. First, to explore how historians consider uses for inaccurate and unreliable evidence and to demonstrate how such materi. s can be used to generate historical interpretations and conclusions. Second, to consider the idea of evidence use as an example of the domain-specific ... Historical Thinking Skills: Definition and Examples Problem-solving is a key part of historical thinking skills because it can motivate you to seek new leads and ask new questions to refocus your research. Example: An archeologist is trying to identify the remains of a human found at a dig site. Defining Authenticity in Historical Problem Solving Defining Authenticity in Historical Problem Solving. Representing historical actors, students vote on what should happen to the land under Germany's control in China after World War I. At Sammamish High School, we've identified seven key elements of problem-based learning, an approach that drives our comprehensive curriculum. Why Can'T Students Think More Like Historians? lication of intellectual processes and skills. In order to identify t he expert's problem solving skills, processes, and heuristics, four professional historians were tested and a model of Histori al Problem Solving was construct ed (Table I). The entry level behavior of co lege student s was determined by administerin Professional Skills, Historical Thinking In practice, this means more group projects with the intent of fostering collaboration, problem solving, and professionalization—skills that we know are essential to current work environments (and to historians). Critical thinking Critical thinking is characterized by a broad set of related skills usually including the abilities to. break down a problem into its constituent parts to reveal its underlying logic and assumptions. recognize and account for one's own biases in judgment and experience. Problem solving skills versus knowledge acquisition: the historical This paper sheds light on an intellectual dispute on the purpose of problem-based learning that took place in the 1970s between two major figures in the history of PBL: Howard S Barrows from McMaster University and Henk Schmidt from Maastricht University. Using historical evidence from archive materials, oral history accounts and contemporary publications, the paper shows that at the core of ... (PDF) Historical Thinking: Analyzing Student and Teacher Ability to The Historical Problem Solving study conducted by Wineburg (1991) sought to compare the ability of historians and top level students, as they analyzed pictures and written documents centered on ... Historian A good historian also has analytical skills when translating findings, problem-solving skills when investigating information from the past, and communication skills when collaborating with colleagues and in the presentation of research. World History Connected If we accept that history teachers want to encourage students to improve their reading, writing, and analytical skills, then guiding students toward recognizing that historical interpretations should be seen as another way of thinking and problem solving, rather than just memorizing "the facts", could be another important skill for students to acquire. Before our students are able to recognize ... Critical Thinking > History (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Critical or reflective thinking originates with the sensing of a problem. It is a quality of thought operating in an effort to solve the problem and to reach a tentative conclusion which is supported by all available data. It is really a process of problem solving requiring the use of creative insight, intellectual honesty, and sound judgment. Skills Clinic Doing the work of a historian takes skilled thinking and problem-solving, which require both training and practice. Teaching students how to identify a problem, locate evidence, and craft a clear solution takes careful coaching and a set of critical-learning tools. Historian Career Profile Communication skills are important for historians because many give presentations on their historical specialty to the public. Historians also need communication skills when they interview people to collect oral histories, consult with clients, or collaborate with colleagues in the workplace. Problem-based learning Problem-based learning ( PBL) is a teaching method in which students learn about a subject through the experience of solving an open-ended problem found in trigger material. The PBL process does not focus on problem solving with a defined solution, but it allows for the development of other desirable skills and attributes. This includes knowledge acquisition, enhanced group collaboration and ... Problem solving Problem solving is the process of achieving a goal by overcoming obstacles, a frequent part of most activities. Problems in need of solutions range from simple personal tasks (e.g. how to turn on an appliance) to complex issues in business and technical fields. The former is an example of simple problem solving (SPS) addressing one issue, whereas the latter is complex problem solving (CPS ... How to Develop Problem Solving Skills: 4 Tips Learning problem-solving techniques is a must for working professionals in any field. No matter your title or job description, the ability to find the root cause of a difficult problem and formulate viable solutions is a skill that employers value. Learning the soft skills and critical thinking techniques that good problem solvers use can help anyone overcome complex problems. How to List Problem-Solving Skills on a Resume [List Included] Problem-solving skills are extremely in-demand right now. Learn how to add problem-solving skills to your resume with our guide. Problem solving skills versus knowledge acquisition: the historical This paper sheds light on an intellectual dispute on the purpose of problem-based learning that took place in the 1970s between two major figures in the history of PBL: Howard S Barrows from McMaster University and Henk Schmidt from Maastricht University. ... A comparison of the effects of Lego TC Logo and problem solving Identified and compared the effects of 2 computer-based learning environments on 30 5th graders' problem-solving (PS) abilities: Lego TC instruction and CAI PS software. 15 Ss were assigned to the Lego TC Logo treatment group, and the other 15 Ss were assigned to the CAI PS treatment group. Both environments promoted PS skills in Ss after a 7-wk exposure. Exploring Student Perceptions of Problem-Based Learning and Clinical Participants felt that the problem-solving, critical thinking, and clinical reasoning they developed during the therapeutic exercise course did carry over into their ability to apply these higher-order thinking and processing skills during CFEs. assignment essay homework paper phd report resume review thesis