We should be teaching students how to solve real problems

Problem-solving is an essential skill for aspiring scientists to develop. Yet, the kinds of problems we ask students to solve in most physics courses are devoid of real-world context, artificially constrained, or remove many of the opportunities for students to make their own decisions (e.g., what kinds of assumptions to make). Though this makes grading easier, it does not adequately prepare students to solve the kinds of problems they will encounter as working scientists or engineers. Recent research has investigated how expert scientists solve problems they routinely encounter in their work, and has characterized the problem-solving process as 29 different decisions to be made. The way to become an expert physicist, then, is to practice making each of these decisions with timely and specific feedback from an instructor. In this talk, I will show examples of how this decision-making can be assessed in detail. I will also discuss how we have adapted an introductory physics 1 course to focus on teaching these kinds of problem-solving skills. Preliminary results show that it is possible to teach real-world problem-solving skills while covering all of the same content as you would otherwise. The data also show that students who receive problem-solving instruction perform better on a common final exam, and receive higher grades in physics 2 compared with students who received traditional instruction. Finally, problem-solving instruction has proved to be more equitable than traditional instruction: there is no correlation between exam performance and high school physics preparation. This means that students who have never taken a physics class before college are able to succeed just as well as students with one or two years of high school physics instruction. We hypothesize that the primary driver of these results is giving students opportunities to practice solving more realistic physics problems, meaning that any instructor should be able to achieve these results if they change the way they think about writing homework and exam problems.