Chapter 7, page 145
In each case, the students talked about something that puzzled them in response to the text. You may also
want to revisit your response to the Reflection at the beginning of the chapter in the light of this
information.
A study by Bereiter and Bird (1985) points to the usefulness of formulating problems to enhance
understanding problem formulation. An example from their study comes from a proficient adult reader who
was reading a narrative passage and became puzzled by the statement that a character was lazy:
Reader: But how could he say she’s lazy when she works so hard? Maybe she’s lazy when it comes to other
things?
Asking questions like this when one is puzzled by the text and setting these puzzles as a problem to be
solved can be very productive for learning. Notice that this process overlaps a great deal with monitoring in
that the reader is actively seeking points in the text that are not understood and then formulating questions
about them.
Comprehension strategies and self-regulated learning. These comprehension strategies fit nicely
into a self-regulated learning framework. If students set a goal of learning and understanding the text, then
they have a range of useful strategies that can employ to help them achieve their goal—using text
structure, summarizing, elaborating, and explanation. While carrying out these strategies, the learner
should monitor understanding. When failures to understand are detected, the learner formulates problems
and then sets new goals to repair comprehension. Thus, all of the comprehension strategies we have
discussed in this section can be viewed as part of the process of setting goals, choosing strategies to meet
goals, monitoring progress, and making adjustments as needed.
In the next section, we will turn to a different group of strategies. These strategies are useful for
solving a variety of problems, including math problems and science problems as well as problems
encountered in fields such as business or public policy making.
Problem Solving Strategies
Problems occur in almost every area of human endeavor. This includes fields ranging from
mathematics (e.g., finding the area under a curve) and chemistry (e.g., determining how much alkaline must
be added to an acidic solution to neutralize it) to business (e.g., working out a marketing plan), foreign
policy (developing recommendations for how to deal with Mideast conflicts), and computer programming
(e.g., developing a better interface for a word processing program). Problems occur when a person has a
goal that cannot be achieved immediately, so that the person must devise and carry out a series of steps to
solve the problem. The steps may be easily carried out, as when a physics professor quickly solves an end-
of-chapter physics problem in a high school textbook. Or the steps may be difficult to carry out, as when
the same physics professor attempts to invent a new instrument to detect asteroids or comets whose orbits
could bring them close to the earth. Problem solving strategies are strategies that generally help problem
solvers solve problems more effectively.
Much of the work on problem solving strategies has been inspired by George Polya’s (1945) classic
work on mathematical problem solving. Polya was a mathematician who took an interest in helping people
learn to solve mathematical problems more effectively. He discussed four strategies that can help problem
solvers solve problems more effectively (cf. Bransford & Stein, 1984). These strategies are illustrated in
Figure 7.6.