Problem Solving Exercises For College Students

Ask groups to identify the major themes or points (Williams, 1993: 12).

Tags: The Purpose Of Critical ThinkingEssay On Uses Of Science In Our LifeDescriptive Essay Beauty NatureVisual Communication AssignmentIntelligent Machinery Turing EssayBiology Coursework 2006Mba Essays EntrepreneurEssay Illustration Robert Smithson Writings

Experts (teachers) in a particular field are often so fluent in solving problems from that field that they can find it difficult to articulate the problem solving principles and strategies they use to novices (students) in their field because these principles and strategies are second nature to the expert.

To teach students problem solving skills, a teacher should be aware of principles and strategies of good problem solving in his or her discipline.

In this article, we'll look at three team building exercises that you can use to improve problem solving and decision making in a new or established team.

Use the following exercises to help your team members solve problems and make decisions together more effectively.

Members must agree which items are most important for their survival.

This activity builds problem-solving skills as team members analyze information, negotiate and cooperate with one another.This will provoke discussion about how teams arrive at decisions, which will make people think about the skills they must use in future team scenarios, such as listening.This can happen when a group places a desire for mutual harmony above a desire to reach the right decision, which prevents people from fully exploring alternative solutions.These exercises aim to promote cohesion, cooperation and trust through group participation in challenging tasks and/or problem situations.Some of the activities can be made specific for the Unit of Study and some can be adapted for online learning.Where discussions are one-sided, draw quieter people in so that everyone is involved, but explain why you're doing this, so that people learn from it.You can use the Stepladder Technique when team discussion is unbalanced.The mathematician George Polya captured the problem solving principles and strategies he used in his discipline in the book (Princeton University Press, 1957).The book includes a summary of Polya’s problem solving heuristic as well as advice on the teaching of problem solving.Here, ask each team member to think about the problem individually and, one at a time, introduce new ideas to an appointed group leader – without knowing what ideas have already been discussed.After the first two people present their ideas, they discuss them together.