Dissemination of ThinkSpace: an online delivery tool of authentic, complex problems to increase students' problem-solving skills

跨学科（99）在我们的技术社会的进步取决于人与强大的定量，诊断和解决问题的能力;然而，我们目前的方法来教学解决问题是不够的。大多数学生无法处理复杂的现实世界问题，因为在学校通常遇到的解决问题任务需要使用有限的策略，例如识别和应用教科书中的正确公式或策略。 该项目在先前帮助学生培养更有效解决问题技能的成功基础上，正在建立一个从事解决问题教育的教师社区，并向该社区传播一个新的在线案例交付工具（称为“ThinkSpace”），以便将复杂的现实问题纳入现有课程。 认识到教学实践是高度抵制变化，在这个项目中采用的战略，以实现系统性的变化是建立核心小组的教师在参与大学谁是致力于解决问题的教育。ThinkSpace可用于各种学科，并通过在开源软件环境中共享负载来维护。 使ThinkSpace开源导致持续改进，因为它在课堂上的使用激发了改进建议。为这一传播任务而组建的团队拥有教师发展和教学创新传播方面的专业知识，以及在使用在线工具在课程中引入真实，复杂问题方面的丰富经验。 这种方法的可扩展性意味着，它是很有可能支持社区在高等教育以及K-12的未来扩张。这可能会在STEM领域产生革命性的变化，因为真实、复杂问题的广泛使用将有助于大量学生培养更强的解决问题的能力。

Interdisciplinary (99)Progress in our technological society depends on people with strong quantitative, diagnostic, and problem-solving skills; yet our current methods for teaching problem-solving are inadequate. Most students are unable to deal with complex real-world problems because the problem-solving tasks typically encountered in school require use of limited strategies like identifying and applying the correct formulae or strategies from the textbook. Building on earlier successes in helping students develop more effective problem solving skills, the project is building a community of faculty engaged in problem solving education and disseminating a new online case delivery tool (called "ThinkSpace") to that community so that complex real-world problems can be incorporated into existing courses. Recognizing that instructional practice is highly resistant to change, the strategy employed in this project to achieve systemic change is to build core groups of faculty at participating universities who are committed to problem-solving education. ThinkSpace can be used in a broad variety of disciplines and maintained by sharing the load in an open source software environment. Making ThinkSpace open source leads to continuous improvement as its use in the classroom stimulates suggestions for improvements. The team assembled for this dissemination task has expertise in faculty development and dissemination of teaching innovations, as well as extensive experience in using online tools to introduce authentic, complex, problems in their courses. The scalability of this approach means that it is quite possible to support future expansion of the community in higher education as well as K-12. This could produce a transformative change in STEM fields, because the widespread use of authentic, complex problems will help a large number of students develop stronger problem-solving skills.