Dr. Mobolaji Williams’s paper “The Missing Curriculum in Physics Problem-Solving Education (PDF)” suggests that traditional physics education doesn’t provide adequate training in generalized problem-solving techniques, being focused instead on training students to solve well-defined homework problems and exam questions. In this section, Dr. Williams tells how he sought to incorporate more generalized problem-solving in teaching his MITES physics courses.
Yes, I did attempt (hopefully successfully!) to incorporate more generalized problem-solving into both courses (at the end of the first and third assignment for Introduction to Oscillations and Waves here and here; and at the start of the fifth assignment for Introduction to Statistical Physics here). Specifically, rather than giving students a problem for which they had to write a solution, I gave them a physical situation and asked them to generate (and later answer) some of their own questions and problems.
The challenges in these types of assignments are at least twofold: First, you have to build students’ technical knowledge in a domain so that they are able to use said domain as a way of perceiving, interpreting, and describing the world. This requires the students to have some experience solving well-defined problems, which certainly takes time to build.
Second, such assignments are quite foreign to students and so they don’t immediately know how to deal with the ambiguity of a physical system without an explicitly stated problem. But of course that’s how most of the world is presented to all of us. The purpose of assignments which ask the students to “ask a question” that they later answer is to get them to practice using their technical knowledge to describe the world based on things that they themselves find interesting rather than based on questions provided by authority figures. The hope is that they carry this skill beyond the course.
