LEARNING BY RESULT-DRIVEN PROBLEM-SOLVING. A GENERAL APPROACH TO COMPUTER-AIDED PROBLEM-SOLVING AND ASSESSMENT

In two recent papers, we have shown how the distinction between solutions and results can be carefully exploited to obtain computer-based problem-solving environments. In such environments the students are guided and stimulated to find their own solutions instead simply studying the teacher’s solution or trying to reproduce it. In particular, we have designed two such environments for problem-solving teaching with spreadsheets and databases.
In these computer-based environments, teacher’s solutions (i.e. their inner formulation, such as formulae or queries) are hidden, while the results (i.e. the actual, and typically numerical, values that solutions produce) are always accessible. This approach produces some interesting effects. For example, the availability of the expected results greatly contributes to a non-ambiguous description of what the problem asks for. More important, by comparing his own results with the teacher’s correct ones, the student is gently guided to retrieve his own solution within a continuous self-assessment environment.
In this paper, we first discuss the methodology in details and then we show how it can be applied to other topics such as physics, computer programming and interactive geometry. We finally report on a new environment for problem-solving in physics which is almost ready and being tested with the students.