Using Problems With Obstacles to Promote Rigorous Learning

Rigorous learning is important because students will be required to engage in both routine and nonroutine problems throughout their lifetime. Anton Korinek, Martin Schindler, and Joseph Stiglitz (2021) illustrate that the number of nonroutine jobs has substantially risen in the past decade in part due to automation and offshoring jobs to other parts of the world.

However, students need to have the knowledge and skills for all sorts of jobs, both routine and nonroutine, as they may have multiple jobs during their lifetime that require various types of knowledge and skills. Take, for example, the later baby boomers, born in the years 1957 to 1964, who have held an average of twelve to thirteen jobs during their lifetime (Toossi, 2002). As such, rigorous learning prepares students with a diverse set of knowledge and skills to navigate the dynamic future job market and the multiple careers that lie ahead.

Rigorous learning also prepares students to face both kind and wicked problems. Picture this: the escape room—a perfectly thrilling time-bound immersive adventure experience that challenges the mind, body, and spirit. Escaperoom.com (2024) defines the experience in this way: “You and your team are locked in a room and are tasked with finding a way to escape.”

For example, you may have to solve a murder mystery, find someone who is missing, or select which door leads to a life of pleasure and which leads to pain. Before you enter an escape room, you are briefed on a mission of your choice. Once inside, you and your team are required to work together to discover hidden clues and hints, decode passwords, search for key items essential to the case, or escape. The beauty of this process is that everything is programmed, scheduled, and routine.

While challenging, escape rooms are what David Epstein (2019) would call “kind environments.” A kind environment is one in which all relevant information is readily available, you see the consequences, the consequences are completely immediate and accurate, and you adjust accordingly. In golf, you may hit the ball down the fairway, or you may go right into the woods. The beauty of golf is that you know the consequences of your actions. In the classroom, students may use the step-by-step process of solving a long-division problem and can evaluate their work from a sample in the textbook or receive direct feedback from a teacher and know immediately whether they are right or wrong. Escape rooms are similar. You learn immediately whether you have made the right decision in your selection of certain choices, and from that knowledge, you figure out next steps. Kind environments cultivate learning because they are a structured, routine, well-designed, and easily predictable environment.

Similarly, kind problems are challenges or situations in which feedback links outcomes directly to the appropriate actions or judgments and is both accurate and plentiful (Hogarth, Lejarraga, & Soyer, 2015). Kind problems give us the light bulb moments when we figure out a small shift in our practice or thinking that enables us to increase performance. An adjustment to a tennis racket, for example, or a change in tactics in using a clue in an escape room gives us immediate feedback, and we can adjust, improve, and do so contemporaneously.

What is challenging is that real life is not golf or escape rooms or even long-division problems. People play golf and go to escape rooms for bonding and retreat. They escape reality. Much in the real world and in traditional classrooms is not kind but wicked. By wicked, I mean, as Thomas Gilovich (1991) wrote, “The world does not play fair. Instead of providing us with clear information that would enable us to ‘know’ better, it presents us with messy data that are random, incomplete, unrepresentative, ambiguous, inconsistent, unpalatable, or secondhand” (p. 3).

Wicked problems are challenges or situations in which feedback in the form of outcomes from actions or observations is poor, misleading, or even missing (Hogarth et al., 2015). Wicked problems provide anti–light bulb moments because our actions are filled with unclear reactions, delays in improvement, and even inaccurate (or absent) feedback. Will sanctions work on reducing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? Will an increase in interest rates reduce inflation? To what extent will teaching students metacognitive strategies improve their learning this year?

While kind environments can be challenging, more of the world consists of wicked environments, and it is the world we must prepare students for. Andreas Schleicher (2019), director of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Directorate for Education and Skills, argues in the OECD Learning Compass 2030 that “education today must be focused on teaching students how to navigate an increasingly complex, volatile and uncertain world... it’s about curiosity, compassion and the courage to put our cognitive, social and emotional resources into action. This will also be our best weapon against the biggest threats of our times: ignorance, hate, and fear.”

OECD has been working on enhancing student learning in both kind and wicked environments. One way is in developing adaptive problem solving for children and adults. Adaptive problem solving may be defined as a problem in which people are solving a problem for which a method of solution is not immediately available in a constantly changing environment (Greiff et al., 2017).

For instance, in one battery of assessments, there is a financial simulation problem that adult learners face that requires them to buy and sell stocks from a number of companies to maximize profit. The challenge is that as they begin making decisions, the computer program begins making changes, forcing the problem solvers to continuously adapt their solutions to the latest evolution of the problem environment.

The changes in the task align to what Benjamin S. Bloom and colleagues described as application or transfer in the taxonomy of the cognitive domain in 1956. Specifically, they state, “If the situations... are to involve application as we are defining it here, then they must either be situations new to the student or situations containing new elements as compared to the situation in which the abstraction was learned” (Bloom et al., 1956, p. 125). Here, students are receiving not only a new situation but also new elements of change as compared to the way the problem was originally presented.

Used with permission. Excerpt from Rigor Redefined: Ten Teaching Habits for Surface, Deep, and Transfer Learning by Michael McDowell. Copyright 2024 by Solution Tree Press, 555 North Morton Street, Bloomington, IN 47404, 800.733.6786, http://SolutionTree.com . All rights reserved.