in Science-Design (commonly called Science) we want to answer a question (a problem-question about “what happens, how, and why?”) by designing an explanatory theory, to “make knowledge better” and help satisfy a human desire for understanding.

    in General Design (commonly called Design) we want to solve a problem by designing a solution that is a better product, activity, strategy, or relationship, to “make things better” by helping satisfy other human needs-and-desires.

* In both kinds of Design, the objective is to solve a problem by "making things better" with improved understanding (in Science-Design) and (in General Design) by improving other aspects of life.  Together, these objectives include almost everything we do in life.     { Examples of Design Objectives for "almost everything" in All Areas of Life }

One part of "almost everything" is... The Wide Scope of Science-Design:  In all of life, not just in science, we use our explanatory theories about “how the world works” to understand “what is happening, how, why” and to predict “what will happen” in the future.  When our knowledge about the world (produced when we design/do/use experiments) and our theories about the world are more thorough and accurate, this improved understanding will increase the accuracy of our theory-based predictions that, along with good values & priorities, help us make wise decisions, personally and professionally, while pursuing our goals in life.  We use scientific thinking often in life, whenever we hear a claim, or make a claim, and ask “what is the evidence-and-logic supporting this claim?” and “how strong is the support for this claim?” and “should I (or we) accept this claim?”, or “how might we adjust this claim, to make a revised claim that is more strongly supported, is more likely to more accurately describe what is happening, how, and why?”

Another part of "almost everything" is... The Wide Scope of General Design:  General Design is used for “engineering” and much more.  The Next Generation Science Standards, for K-12 Education in the United States, use a broad definition of engineering (it's "any engagement in a systematic practice of design to achieve solutions to particular human problems") and technologies (which "result when engineers apply their understanding of the natural world and of human behavior to design ways to satisfy human needs and wants" and "include all types of human-made systems and processes") in order to "emphasize practices that all citizens should learn – such as defining problems in terms of criteria and constraints, generating and evaluating multiple solutions, building and testing prototypes, and optimizing – which have not been explicitly included in science standards until now." (from Appendix I, "Engineering Design in the NGSS")   When we look beyond engineering, we see a much wider range of objectives for General Design, which therefore includes a MUCH wider range of human activities.

Combining these "wide scopes" (for Science-Design & General Design) shows that people are solving problems with creative-and-critical design thinking in a wide range of design fields that include engineering, architecture, mathematics, music, art, fashion, literature, education, philosophy, history, science (physical, biological, social), law, business, athletics, and medicine.  People also use Design Thinking throughout their everyday lives in activities that are not defined by a "field", whenever their objective is to solve a problem by "making things better," whenever they want to design (to find, invent, or improve) a better product, activity, strategy, relationship (in General Design) and/or (in Science-Design) an explanatory theory.  These objectives include almost everything we do in life.

Problem-Solving Process

The basic process is simple:

    first, to Define a Problem you Define your Objective (for what you want to “make better”) and Define your Goals (for a satisfactory Problem-Solution);

    then, to Solve the Problem you creatively Generate Options (for a Problem-Solution) and critically Evaluate Options, and continue to Generate-and-Evaluate in creative-and-critical iterative Cycles of Design.

Later in this page you can see “more about process” in different models-for-process.==  In all models, an important activity is...

Designing Experiments so you can Use Experiments

What is an experiment?   Basically, an experiment is experience that is mental or physical.  An experiment is the experience you get whenever you mentally imagine a situation (you think it) or physically actualize a situation (you do it).     {these experimental situations can be called an experimental systems}

How do you DESIGN experiments?  You can do a wide variety of experiments.  To stimulate your creative thinking — to reduce restrictive assumptions so you can more freely explore the wide variety of Options for Experiments — with a simple, broad, minimally restrictive definition:  an Experiment is any Situation/System that provides an opportunity to get Information by making Predictions (in a Mental Experiment) or making Observations (in a Physical Experiment), so an Experimental Situation is any Prediction-Situation or Observation-Situation.

How do you USE experiments?  During a process of problem solving (in Science-Design and General Design) you often Design Experiments (they're “things happening” in Experimental Situations, in Experimental Systems) that you think might provide useful Information, that might help you solve the problem.  Then you USE Experiments in three ways:

    1. USE an Experiment (Mental or Physical) to make Information (Predictions or Observations);

    2. USE this Experimental Information to do Evaluation of an Option;

    3. USE this Experiment-Based Evaluation to guide Generation of other Options.
    4. USE this Experiment-Based Evaluation to guide Design of New Experiments.

These USES are described in more detail below, and you can see them in the diagram.  When you study it, 8 times you'll find "using" or "Use" or "use".  And when you move your mouse over the "1 2 3 3" boxes added to it, you can see four isolation diagrams that show only the problem-solving actions for USE #1 ("using" to make Information) and USE #2 ("Use" to do Evaluation) and USE #3 ("use" to guide Generation in one Science Cycle & two Design Cycles).

1. for Experiment → Information,  you USE an Experiment — by “running it” physically or mentally — to make two kinds of Experimental Information.  How?

    You imagine the Experimental System in a Mental Experiment so you can make PREDICTIONS,

    or you actualize the Experimental System in a Physical Experiment so you can make OBSERVATIONS.

2. for Information → Evaluation,  you USE this Experimental Information (from #1) to do two kinds of Experiment-Based Evaluation, with...

    • evaluative Reality Checks:  During a process of Science-Design or General Design, you can test your explanatory Theory(s) by comparing your Theory-based PREDICTIONS with Reality-based OBSERVATIONS.  This evaluative comparison is a Reality Check that will help you determine how closely “the way you think the world is” corresponds to “the way the world really is.”

    • evaluative Quality Checks:  Early in a process of General Design, you Define your GOALS for a Solution, for the properties you want in a problem-Solution that is ideal, or at least is satisfactory.  Later, you generate Options for a Solution.  You can test the Quality of an Option by comparing your GOALS (for your desired properties, which define Quality) with your PREDICTIONS (about expected properties of this Option) or with OBSERVATIONS (the observed properties of this Option).  These evaluative comparisons — when you ask “how closely do the properties of this Option match the properties I want?” — are Quality Checks.

3. for Evaluation → Generation,  you USE this Experiment-based critical Evaluation (of an old Option in #2) to stimulate-and-guide your creative Generation (of a new Option in #3).  How?

    • In Science-Design, if necessary — if you were “surprised” because (when you Evaluated in #2 using a Reality Check) your OBSERVATIONS didn't match your PREDICTIONS — you ask (when you're Generating in #3) “how can I revise my old Option {for a Theory} about how I think the world is, so it corresponds more closely to how the world really is.”

   • In General Design, you ask (based on Evaluation in #2 using a Quality Check) “what aspects of the old Option {for a Solution} need to be improved?” and then (for Generation in #3) “how can I revise this old Option to improve it, to generate a better new Option?”

4. for Evaluation → Generation,  analogous to #3, you USE the Experiment-Based Evaluation (from #2) to stimulate-and-guide your creative Generation of more Information, with more Experiments.   Why?  in Science-Design or General Design, you will want more Information if you think it will help you do better Evaluation.   How?  you ask “what additional Information (Predictions or Obervations) would be useful for Evaluation, and what Experiments will help me get this Information?” to guide you in Designing More Experiments that you can Use-Use-Use-Use in the four ways (1 2 3 4) outlined above.

MORE – [i.o.u. - later, maybe in late-2022, here I will add a link to explain 9 ways to use experiments]

Ideas versus Skills?

Most educators want to teach ideas AND skills,* but unfortunately a competitive tension often exists.  If we are not able to maximize a mastery of both, we should aim for an optimal combination of ideas and skills.  But what is optimal?  Many educators, including me, think the balance should shift toward more emphasis on skills and skills-with-ideas, aiming for an improvement in skills-ability that outweighs (in our value system) any decrease in ideas-ability.  This is possible because "ideas versus skills" is not a zero-sum game, especially for lifelong learning when we educate for life to help students cope with a wide range of challenges in their futures.

* For example, in Education for Thinking (ToC), Deanna Kuhn explains why "schools... should teach students to use their minds well, in school and beyond."  In her website (educationforthinking.org), she asks What should education accomplish? and answers "the most important mission of schools should be to teach children how to use their minds – how to think and learn – so that as adults they will be able and disposed to acquire whatever new knowledge and skills they may need."

The Difficulty of Designing Exams to Evaluate Skills:  We want to generate accurate information about student achievements with both ideas and skills.  But measuring ideas-knowledge is easy compared with the difficulty & expense of accurately measuring skills-knowledge.  This is an important factor when educators (at the levels of classroom, school, district, state, and nation) develop strategies & make policy decisions for education, and there are Rational Reasons to Not Teach Thinking Skills.

 
PROBLEM-SOLVING Skills

We can define goals for helping students use a variety of Problem-Solving Skills, including General & Experiment-Using & Metacognitive & Process-Coordinating.

GENERAL Skills  (for Problem-Solving)

CREATIVE THINKING and CRITICAL THINKING are useful for solving all problems, in all areas of life.

Most problem solving (to "make it better") involves people, and Design Thinking emphasizes the essential skill of empathy.

Productive Thinking occurs "when you effectively combine Creative Thinking and Critical Thinking with accurate Knowledge-of-Ideas."

Thinking can be productive in a variety of ways.  For example, skillful argumentation "combines Evaluative Thinking with a Persuasion Strategy and Communication Skills."

Later in the page we'll look at Teaching Strategies for helping students improve their Productive Thinking.  The rest of this section describes some interesting ways to analyze General Thinking Skills.F8E2FF

Bloom's Taxonomy

Using Bloom's Taxonomy for [Goal-Directed] Course Design by Barbara Shadden.

What is it?  The basic principles of Bloom's Taxonomy (Original 1956, and Revised 2001) are described by Patricia Armstrong (for Vanderbilt U) who links to a summary and to a guide to Bloom’s Taxonomy & Bloom's Taxonomy: Original and Revised by Mary Forehand.   Assessing Learning Objectives using Bloom's Taxonomy (from U of Illinois) includes Sample Test Questions.   {a brief summary and in-depth analysis}

more about Domains-with-Levels:  Between 1948 and 1956, Benjamin Bloom led a committee that proposed a Taxonomy of Learning Domains (Cognitive, Affective, Psychomotor) along with Levels of Learning (e.g. for Cognitive, Bloom's levels are Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, Evaluation);  introduction - elaboration - an overview (by Vernellia Randall, U of Dayton School of Law) describes the domain-categories, "Cognitive is for mental skills (Knowledge), affective is for growth in feelings or emotional areas (Attitude), while psychomotor is for manual or physical skills (Skills)."

Thinking Skills in Common Core

In a framework similar to Bloom's, Robin Fogarty – in 7 Thinking Skills of Common Core – analyzes 7 Thinking Skills (Critical, Creative, Complex, Comprehensive, Collaborative, Communicative, with Cognitive Transfer) plus The Three Story Intellect (Gather, Process, Apply), and outlines strategies for explicitly teaching these skills.

EXPERIMENT-USING Skills  (for Solving Problems)

During life, we naturally “do EXPERIMENTS” that give us EXPERIENCES.  Sometimes we consciously decide to Design Experiments.  Why?  You will want more experiences (so you can get more information about “what is happening”) if you think this will help you do better Evaluation.   How?  You ask “what additional Information (Predictions or Obervations) would be useful for Evaluation, and what Experiments will help me get this Information?” to guide you in Designing More Experiments that you Use-Use-Use-Use in four ways.

Although experimental skills — by Designing Experiments and Doing Experiments and Using Experiments — are generally useful (playing key roles in all problem solving), experimenting is typically associated with Science.  For example,...

In an overview of Scientific Method by Kathleen Marrs (of IUPUI),  Section 2 — "Experimentation: The Key to the Scientific Method" — begins, "A key ingredient of the scientific process: the controlled experiment."  She describes principles of experimenting, and links to a page with experiments to test explanatory theories about Why are we sleepy in class?

Or, from U of Arizona, in an everyday situation you might wonder why doesn't the light work? and design/do/use experiments so you can find the cause and solve the problem.

Generally useful experimental skills (examined in ERIC Digests) are observation skills & measurement skills.

Mill's Methods:  These logical principles can help you Design Useful Experiments and Analyze Experimental Observations to Determine Causes.   Examples (in visual tables) & Explanations and Examples (more thorough) & Explanations

Some ideas about experiments, from my studies of Scientific Methods, are summarized in a brief overview and with details about goal-directed design, anomaly resolution, crucial experiments, heuristic experiments, vicarious experimentation, thought-experiments, and more.

And more generally — for Science and/or General Design — my 4 Ways to Use Experiments and Principles & Strategies for Experimental Design to Generate Useful Information that is Old or New.

When it was still online — before it unfortunately disappeared between early-2017 and mid-2018 [[check Wayback Machine]] — Lester Miller's Introduction to Scientific Method used a model with 7 steps and a flowchart showing Hypothetico-Deductive Logic.  To illustrate the scientific skill of designing useful experiments, they used the historical question of Spontaneous Generation, and explained how the hypothesis of Francesco Redi — proposing that, to produce maggots, flies (not meat by itself) are necessary — was supported by observations in the experiments he designed and ran.

also:  Katie Mayfield cleverly designed a slide show with more details about the history of "spontaneous generation" theories (pro & con) and the scientific resolution of this controversy due to the carefully designed experiments of Francesco Redi and (later) Louis Pasteur.

You can find many articles — when you explore by scrolling and clicking links — about designing controlled experiments by Anne Marie Helmenstine & others.

PERSONAL Skills  (for Thinking about Self)

A very useful personal skill is developing-and-using a...

Growth Mindset:  If self-education is broadly defined as learning from your experiences,   better self-education is learning more effectively by learning more from experience, and getting more experiences.   One of the best ways to learn more effectively is by developing a better growth mindset so — when you ask yourself “how well am I doing in this area of life?” and honestly answer “not well enough” — you are thinking “not yet” (instead of “not ever”) because you are confident that in this area of life (as in most areas, including those that are most important) you can “grow” by improving your skills, when you invest intelligent effort in your self-education.  And you can support the self-education of other people by helping them improve their own growth mindsets.
    Carol Dweck Revisits the Growth Mindset and (also by Dweck) a video, Increasing Educational Equity and Opportunity.
    3 Ways Educators Can Promote A Growth Mindset by Dan LaSalle, for Teach for America.
    Growth Mindset: A Driving Philosophy, Not Just a Tool by David Hochheiser, for Edutopia.
    Growth Mindset, Educational Equity, and Inclusive Excellence by Kris Slowinski who links to 5 videos.
    What’s Missing from the Conversation: The Growth Mindset in Cultural Competency by Rosetta Lee.
    YouTube video search-pages for [growth mindset] & [mindset in education] & [educational equity mindset].

also:  Growth Mindset for Creativity

Self-Perception -- [[a note to myself: accurate understanding/evaluation of self + confidence in ability to improve/grow ]]

METACOGNITIVE Skills  (for Solving Problems)

What is metacognition?  Thinking is cognition.  When you observe your thinking and think about your thinking (maybe asking “how can I think more effectively?”) this is meta-cognition, which is cognition about cognition.  To learn more about metacognition — what it is, why it's valuable, and how to use it more effectively — some useful web-resources are:

a comprehensive introductory overview by Nancy Chick, for Vanderbilt U.

my links-section has descriptions of (and links to) pages by other authors: Jennifer Livingston, How People Learn, Marsha Lovett, Carleton College, Johan Lehrer, Rick Sheets, William Peirce, and Steven Shannon, plus links for Self-Efficacy with a Growth Mindset, and more about metacognition.

my summaries about the value of combining cognition-and-metacognition and regulating it for Thinking Strategies (of many kinds) to improve Performing and/or Learning by Learning More from Experience with a process that is similar to...

the Strategies for Self-Regulated Learning developed by other educators.

videos — search youtube for [metacognition] and [metacognitive strategies] and [metacognition in education].

And in other parts of this links-page,

As one part of guiding students during an inquiry activity a teacher can stimulate their metacognition by helping them reflect on their experiences.

While solving problems, almost always it's useful to think with empathy and also with metacognitive self-empathy by asking “what do they want?” and “what do I want?” and aiming for a win-win solution.

PROCESS-COORDINATING Skills  (for Solving Problems)

THINKING SKILLS and THINKING PROCESS:  When educators develop strategies to improve the problem solving abilities of students, usually their focus is on thinking skills.  But thinking process is also important.

Therefore, it's useful to define thinking skills broadly, to include thinking that leads to decisions-about-actions, and actions:

        thinking  →  action-decisions  →  actions

[[ I.O.U. -- later, in mid-June 2021, the ideas below will be developed -- and i'll connect it with Metacognitive Skills because we use Metacognition to Coordinate Process.

[[ here are some ideas that eventually will be in this section:

Collaborative Problem Solving [[ this major new section will link to creative.htm#collaborative-creativity (with a brief summary of ideas from there) and expand these ideas to include general principles and "coordinating the collaboration" by deciding who will do what, when, with some individual "doing" and some together "doing" ]]

actions can be mental and/or physical (e.g. actualizing Experimental Design to do a Physical Experiment, or actualizing an Option-for-Action into actually doing the Action

[[a note to myself: educational goals:  we should help students improve their ability to combine their thinking skills — their creative Generating of Options and critical Generating of Options, plus using their Knowledge-of-Ideas that includes content-area knowledge plus the Empathy that is emphasized in Design Thinking — into an effective thinking process.

[[ Strategies for Coordinating:  students can do this by skillfully Coordinating their Problem-Solving Actions (by using their Conditional Knowledge) into an effective Problem-Solving Process.

[[ During a process of design, you coordinate your thinking-and-actions by making action decisions about “what to do next.”  How?  When you are "skillfully Coordinating..." you combine cognitive/metacognitive awareness (of your current problem-solving process) with (by knowing, for each skill, what it lets you accomplish, and the conditions in which it will be useful).

[[ a little more about problem-solving process

[[ here are more ideas that might be used here:

Sometimes tenacious hard work is needed, and perseverance is rewarded.  Or it may be wise to be flexible – to recognize that what you've been doing may not be the best approach, so it's time to try something new – and when you dig in a new location your flexibility pays off.

Sometimes PERSEVERANCE is needed, so DIG DEEPER.		Sometimes FLEXIBILITY is needed, so DIG ELSEWHERE.

Perseverance and flexibility are contrasting virtues.  When you aim for an optimal balancing of this complementary pair, self-awareness by “knowing yourself” is useful.  Have you noticed a personal tendency to err on the side of either too much perseverance or not enough?  Do you tend to be overly rigid, or too flexible?

Making a wise decision about perseverance — when you ask, “Do I want to continue in the same direction, or change course?” * — is more likely when you have an aware understanding of your situation, your actions, the results, and your goals.  Comparing results with goals is a Quality Check, providing valuable feedback that you can use as a “compass” to help you move in a useful direction.  When you look for signs of progress toward your goals in the direction you're moving, you may have a feeling, based on logic and experience, that your strategy for coordinating the process of problem solving isn't working well, and it probably never will.  Or you may feel that the goal is almost in sight and you'll soon reach it.

- How I didn't Learn to Ski (and then did) with Persevering plus Flexible Insight -

PRINCIPLES for PROBLEM SOLVING

Should we explicitly teach principles for thinking?

Can we use a process of inquiry to teach principles for inquiry?

Should we use a “model” for problem-solving process?

combining models?

What are the benefits of infusion and separate programs? 

Principles & Strategies & Models ?

Should we explicitly teach “principles” for thinking?

Using evidence and logic — based on what we know about the ways people think and learn — we should expect a well-designed combination of “experience + reflection + principles” to be more educationally effective than experience by itself, to help students improve their creative-and-critical thinking skills and whole-process skills in solving problems (for design-inquiry) and answering questions (for science-inquiry).

Can we use a process-of-inquiry to teach principles-for-inquiry?

Yes.  Students can use inquiry Process to recognize inquiry Principles.  How?  A teacher can combine Experience + Reflection + Principles into sequences (of E+R→P, ERP)* while guiding students with questions that will help them use a process-of-inquiry to learn principles-of-inquiry.

* In a typical sequence of ERP, students first get Experiences by doing a design activity.  During an activity and afterward, they can do Reflections (by thinking about their experiences) and this will help them recognize Principles for doing Design-Thinking Process that is Problem-Solving Process.    {design thinking is problem-solving thinking}

During reflections & discussions, typically students are not discovering new thoughts & actions.  Instead they are recognizing that during a process of design they are using skills they already know because they already have been using Design Thinking to do almost everything in their life.  A teacher can facilitate these recognitions by guiding students with questions about what they are doing now, and what they have done in the past, and how these experiences are similar, but also are different in some ways.  When students remember (their prior experience) and recognize (the process they did use, and are using), they can formulate principles for their process of design thinking.  But when they formulate principles for their process of problem solving, they are just making their own experience-based prior knowledge — of how they have been solving problems, and are now solving problems — more explicit and organized.

Should we use a “model” for problem-solving process?

If we help students "make their own experience-based prior knowledge... more explicit and organized" by showing them how their knowledge can be organized into a model for problem-solving process, will this help them improve their problem-solving abilities?

IOU - This mega-section will continue being developed in mid-June 2021.

[[a note to myself: thinking skills and thinking process — What is the difference? - Experience + Reflection + Principles - coordination-decisions

[[are the following links specifically for this section about "experience + principles"? maybe not because these seem to be about principles, not whether to teach principles.]]

An excellent overview is Teaching Thinking Skills by Kathleen Cotton. (the second half of her page is a comprehensive bibliography)

This article is part of The School Improvement Research Series (available from Education Northwest and ERIC) where you can find many useful articles about thinking skills & other topics, by Cotton & other authors.  [[a note to myself: it still is excellent, even though it's fairly old, written in 1991 -- soon, I will search to find more-recent overviews ]]

Another useful page — What Is a Thinking Curriculum? (by Fennimore & Tinzmann) — begins with principles and then moves into applications in Language Arts, Mathematics, Sciences, and Social Sciences.

My links-page for Teaching-Strategies that promote Active Learning explores a variety of ideas about strategies for teaching (based on principles of constructivism, meaningful reception,...) in ways that are intended to stimulate active learning and improve thinking skills.  Later, a continuing exploration of the web will reveal more web-pages with useful “thinking skills & problem solving” ideas (especially for K-12 students & teachers) and I'll share these with you, here and in TEACHING ACTIVITIES.

Of course, thinking skills are not just for scholars and schoolwork, as emphasized in an ERIC Digest, Higher Order Thinking Skills in Vocational Education.  And you can get information about 23 ==Programs that Work from the U.S. Dept of Education. 

goals can include improving affective factors & character == e.g. helping students learn how to develop & use use non-violent solutions for social problems.

INFUSION and/or SEPARATE PROGRAMS?

In education for problem solving, one unresolved question is "What are the benefits of infusion, or separate programs?"  What is the difference?

With infusion, thinking skills are closely integrated with content instruction in a subject area, in a "regular" course.

In separate programs, independent from content-courses, the explicit focus of a course is to help students improve their thinking skills.

In her overview of the field, Kathleen Cotton says,

    Of the demonstrably effective programs, about half are of the infused variety, and the other half are taught separately from the regular curriculum. ...  The strong support that exists for both approaches... indicates that either approach can be effective.  Freseman represents what is perhaps a means of reconciling these differences [between enthusiastic advocates of each approach] when he writes, at the conclusion of his 1990 study: “Thinking skills need to be taught directly before they are applied to the content areas. ...  I consider the concept of teaching thinking skills directly to be of value especially when there follows an immediate application to the content area.”

For principles and examples of infusion, check the National Center for Teaching Thinking which lets you see ==What is Infusion? (an introduction to the art of infusing thinking skills into content instruction), and ==sample lessons (for different subjects, grade levels, and thinking skills). -- resources from teach-think-org -- [also, lessons designed to infuse Critical and Creative Thinking into content instruction]

Infusing Teaching Thinking Into Subject-Area Instruction (by Robert Swarz & David Perkins) - and more about the book

And we can help students improve their problem-solving skills with teaching strategies that provide structure for instruction and strategies for thinking. ==[use structure+strategies only in edu-section?

Adobe [in creative]

MORE about Teaching Principles for Problem Solving