Interdisciplinary (99) Progress in our technological society depends on people with strong quantitative, diagnostic, and problem-solving skills; yet our current methods for teaching problem-solving are inadequate. Most students are unable to deal with complex real-world problems because the problem-solving tasks typically encountered in school require use of limited strategies like identifying and applying the correct formulae or strategies from the textbook. Building on earlier successes in helping students develop more effective problem solving skills, the project is building a community of faculty engaged in problem solving education and disseminating a new online case delivery tool (called "ThinkSpace") to that community so that complex real-world problems can be incorporated into existing courses. Recognizing that instructional practice is highly resistant to change, the strategy employed in this project to achieve systemic change is to build core groups of faculty at participating universities who are committed to problem-solving education. ThinkSpace can be used in a broad variety of disciplines and maintained by sharing the load in an open source software environment. Making ThinkSpace open source leads to continuous improvement as its use in the classroom stimulates suggestions for improvements. The team assembled for this dissemination task has expertise in faculty development and dissemination of teaching innovations, as well as extensive experience in using online tools to introduce authentic, complex, problems in their courses. The scalability of this approach means that it is quite possible to support future expansion of the community in higher education as well as K-12. This could produce a transformative change in STEM fields, because the widespread use of authentic, complex problems will help a large number of students develop stronger problem-solving skills.
Many students approach their university education with a check-box mentality, where learning means memorizing a series of isolated facts leading to silos of knowledge. This restricted goal does not convey the excitement of learning nor does it develop the critical thinking skills so urgently needed to help solve the vital challenges and opportunities facing our society. National-level reports have highlighted calls to action; for example, The U.S. President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology stated in November 2010: "We must prepare students so they have a strong foundation in STEM subjects and are able to use this knowledge in their personal and professional lives. And we must inspire students so that all are motivated to study STEM subjects in school and many are excited about the prospect of having careers in STEM fields." To embed into courses challenging tasks that motivate students and engage them in compelling and relevant problems, we created ThinkSpace www.thinkspace.org/ , a web-based, instructional platform designed to deliver real-world cases to large numbers of students. Given its ability to deliver case-based instruction on a large-scale, ThinkSpace has the long-term potential to help address two national challenges 1) increase the number of scientists and engineers by stemming the loss of students who leave science and engineering majors early because they find the material dry and uncompelling and 2) improve student problem-solving skills. Typically, when students start working on complex cases they often struggle and become frustrated. They have difficulty in multiple areas: analyzing the problem to identify its components, planning, differentiating relevant from irrelevant information, monitoring their progress to check if they are still on track, forming and justifying their proposed solutions. To learn these skills, students need timely feedback on what they are doing well and in which areas they need to improve. Yet it is support and feedback that is most difficult for an instructor to deliver in a timely manner when there are large numbers of students. ThinkSpace solves both problems. Instructors design a series of linked tasks in ThinkSpace, e.g. asking students to explore a problem, provide a tentative analysis, and finally submit a solution. Within each task students submit work, and tools within ThinkSpace provide feedback to students. These tasks are then bundled into a "case" for delivery. Key to the scaffolding is the array of flexible feedback tools within ThinkSpace, such as students comparing their work to expert solutions, to peer review, and efficient faculty-feedback through libraries of pre-loaded comments, and clickable rubrics. ThinkSpace is a multidisciplinary tool scaled to multi-institutional, large student populations and supports distance/blended and team learning practices. ThinkSpace project is open source software and is able to easily integrate with other software applications it runs in the user’s browser. ThinkSpace currently supports 7100 users, 909 of whom are from outside of Iowa State University (home of ThinkSpace), 368 classes, and 2007 portfolios. Disciplines using ThinkSpace include advertising, algebra teacher analytics, animal science, applied linguistics, business, communication, dietetics, education, engineering, geology, horticulture, internal medicine, journalism, meteorology, microbiology, parasitology, physics, sociology, teacher education, toxicology, and veterinary clinical and anatomic pathology. ThinkSpace and its predecessors have shown that significant learning gains can be achieved when students are presented with a complex problem as a series of phases the student must complete (Bender & Danielson, 2011; Danielson, Mills, Vermeer & Bender, 2008; Danielson, Mills, Vermeer, Preast, Young, Christopher, George, Wood, & Bender 2007; Danielson, Bender, Vermeer, Mills, & Lockee, 2003, Antonenko et al. 2011, Ogilvie 2009).
