Learning to solve problems is the most important skill that students can learn in any setting. In professional contexts, people are paid to solve problems, not to complete exams. In everyday life, we constantly solve problems. Karl Popper stated this maxim most clearly in his book All Life Is Problem Solving (1999). We face problems, big and small, simple and complex, clear and confusing every day in our lives. But as a field, educators have largely ignored how to learn to solve problems.
There is virtually no instructional design literature on problem solving. Bob Gagné referred to problem solving in his early editions of the Conditions of Learning, but in later editions, he gave up on it, preferring instead to deal with higher-order rules (similar to story problems). Why is that? If problems are pandemic and so essential to everyday and professional activity, why do we not exert more effort in helping students learn to solve problems?
Over the past three decades, a number of information-processing models of problem solving, such as the classic General Problem Solver (Newell and . . .
