EFFECTS, MEANING AND LEARNING PROCESSES REGARDING EXPERTS' STORIES AND NOVICE PROBLEM SOLVING IN AN ILL-STRUCTURED PROBLEM-SOLVING ENVIRONMENT
Open Access
- Author:
- Hernández-Serrano, Julián
- Graduate Program:
- Instructional Systems
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- March 06, 2001
- Committee Members:
- Dr David H Jonassen, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Dr Philip H Henning, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Lamartine Frain Hood, Committee Member
Spiro E Stefanou, Committee Member - Keywords:
- food product development
storytelling
stories
narrative intelligence
ill-structured problem solving - Abstract:
- The situations that practitioners typically have to face in the workplace are filled with ill-structured problems. A case library, a systematic collection and organization of a number of experts' experiences, encoded as cases, and presented in the form of stories to learners while interacting with a task environment, is considered by many scholars as a way to increase ill-structured problem-solving skill in novices. Despite the acknowledged potential of case libraries, no prior studies have been conducted that clearly isolate the effect that a case library may have on the acquisition of ill-structured problem-solving skills on novices. For this reason, this mixed-model design study, quantitative and qualitative, attempts to shed some light into the effects, meaning and learning processes regarding experts' stories and novice problem solving. Forty-four undergraduates were subjected to the following: a pretest, random assignment to one of three groups (experimental or case library with stories, comparable or fact sheet with material comparable to the stories but presented as facts, and control or text randomly selected from a textbook unrelated to the material), and post test. The tests, divided in two parts, attempted to measure whether the experimental group incorporated the lessons to be learned from the stories in the case library. The results on one part seemed to indicate that indeed the case library supported ill-structured problem-solving skills when compared to fact sheets or random text, whereas on the other part the results were inconclusive. For the qualitative part, six students, two from each experimental situation, were engaged in separate in-depth interviews to learn about how they went about solving problems in school and how stories could form part of this process. In addition, three novice practitioners were engaged for a 7-month period through two in-depth interviews and two problem-solving sessions in order to learn about problem-solving processes in a work setting and to determine whether stories were an important component of these processes. Based on this research, a model representing how stories form part of the process of problem solving is presented and discussed in terms of the data collected and in terms of other theories. Implications for instructional designers and educators in general are also provided.