What Will Happen When Students Are Not Exposed to Problem Solving Programs?
Based on my 41 years experience in mathematics education, students without problem solving knowledge will have the following problems:
- Will not be able to think skillfully such as not being able to solve HOT questions successfully. Why? One of the most important skills in the learning of mathematics is to be able to analyze problems. Analyzing problem is not like what the motivators use to tell, that is, ‘try to understand what the problem wants’. The problem is how to understand a problem if one does not know the meaning of ‘analyze’. This skill has to be learned and can be taught. It does not come naturally even with intelligent students. As Professor Emeritus David Perkins said, ‘There is no correlation between ability to think skillfully and intelligence’. For this reason, Malaysia ranked almost at the bottom among countries who participated in TIMMS and PISA in mathematics and science even though we have many intelligent students who scored 8As in PMR examination (but not in PT3 examination) and who score 10As in SPM.
- Certainly there is no learning without thinking. ‘Learning is a consequence of thinking’ (Professor Emeritus David Perkins, Harvard Graduate School Of Education). In fact the main goals of education are to teach for understanding, to help students to think critically and creatively, to solve non-routine problems and to develop a culture of thinking not only in the classrooms but also in real life (David Perkins). From Islamic perspectives the main goals of education, according to Professor Syed Naquib Al-Attas, are to produce people with moral and ethical values, integrity, passion for knowledge, realizing that knowledge is to be acquired through the process of reasoning and thinking and the methodology of teaching is such that it will ultimately produce people who can think critically and creatively and who will be closer to God. In other words those students who are not exposed to Problem Solving will continue to learn like parrots so obsessed with trying to learn just to pass many types of examinations from school level to university examinations but fail to optimize their potentials as human beings who can play the role of problem solvers and thinkers.
