a response to the chapter in Kirschner, P. A., & Hendrick, C. (2020). How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice. Routledge
This chapter is about a book rather than an article, but also it seems to overlap a lot with chapter 6 (what you know determines what you learn). The book, by Newell and Simon is from the early 1979s. Apparently before this there were two ways of looking at how people solve problems (a) behaviourist where you reproduce something you have seen before to solve the problem or (b) Gestalt where you just keep shifting things around till you hit an answer. Both of those ways of seeing things have major snags: (a) requires you to have seen something similar and (b) could be infinite and so impossible in terms of time. They mention a Rubik’s cube as being something it would take you a very long time to solve with random moves.
Newell and Simon talk about ‘problem spaces’. So you have the problem itself as represented in the real world, but also the way someone conceptualises it. With things like the cabbage goat wolf small boat problem, the real world picture is boat, river, animals, but the problem space is the same idea as all those puzzles where you have to move discs across rods under certain rules. If you just randomly try putting wolves and goats in boats you could take a long time trying, but if you can conceptualise the space ? work in the problem space ? then you are moving concepts, not individual items. I think … They talk about the structure of the problem space.
They take this back to have another dig at discovery learning, saying you need to help students get a sense of the problem space, not leave students trying to discover the solution to a problem they have no idea about. But once again I’d say which teacher would do that ? Surely this is a straw man conception of discovery learning.
sallyhirst 