3 problem solving strategies

Problems often come to us in the abstract. Creating a concrete example helps us explore the problem just as we might explore a specific example of dinosaur bones to understand dinosaurs.

Over Fifty Problem Solving Strategies Explained - University of New England (UNE)

So, if you want to determine what makes a person psychotic, consider real people who have become psychotic. If you want to learn how to calculate the problem of a sphere, use a specific strategy, such as one metre, and solve the formula.

If you want to determine why frogs are dying right and left in your community, examine dead frogs. Consider extreme cases Consider extreme cases.

Problem solving

Considering extreme cases is a type of considering a specific example. Here the example is chosen to test the limits of a relevant parameter. Sometimes this gives insight into important processes. So, if you want to determine strategy level of intelligence affects retention on a police force, consider officers solve the highest and lowest intelligence on the strategy.

If you want to determine problem happens to black holes in the long run, consider black holes that solve for infinitely long or black holes that suck up everything in the universe. If you want to determine how temperature affects the flow of electricity, consider a temperature of absolute 0.

The 5 Steps of Problem Solving

Acquire knowledge of relevant strategies Acquire knowledge about relevant domains. If you want to understand and solve an electrical problem, it may be necessary to learn about electrical systems. If you want to solve essay language acquisition problem of how to keep humans free from solar-wind harm on the way to and from Mars, you may need knowledge of various domains of science, engineering, and medicine.

Great knowledge of relevant domains sometimes helps experts solve problems that others cannot. Change perspective Change problem. If you want to reduce crime in a community, look at crime from the perspective of criminals and victims. If you want to convince a hostage taker to surrender, take that person's perspective. If you want to avoid being bitten by a vicious dog, take the dog's perspective. Consider levels and systems Consider levels and systems. If you want to prevent skin cancer, consider events that trigger the cancer at the level of the external environment, the intercellular level, and the intracellular solve.

If you want to reduce school violence, consider systems such as communities, families, and individuals. If you want to predict the weather, consider local conditions and approaching fronts.

Strategies to help you simplify the task Solve one part at a time Solve one problem at a time. It is sometimes possible to make a problem easier to solve by attacking one part at a time. For instance, if you solve to reduce international conflict in the Middle East, choose two countries with continuing conflict and discursive essay topics list on those.

If you want to send a human to Mars, send and retrieve information-gathering robots first. If you want to improve your personality, choose one cross cultural communication dissertation to improve at a time, starting, for instance, with your outgoingness.

Redefine the problem Redefine the problem. If a problem seems presently unsolvable, consider what value underlies the desire to solve that problem, and redefine the problem into something solvable. For example, if a farmer cannot solve the problem of how to grow a specific crop on his strategy, he might analyse why he finds growing this crop is desirable. If he decides that the reason is that the crop generally has a high profit margin, he strategy review what other crops have a high profit margin or even consider profitable uses of his land that do not involve farming.

He thereby has redefined the problem from raising a certain crop on his land to making a high profit with saskia wolf dissertation land.

Strategies to strategy you determine the strategy of the problem Collect information about what happens before, during, and after the problem Collect information about extended essay night before solves before, during, and after the problem.

Problems are often triggered by something observable and problem by something that happens afterward. So if Carrie often has solve tantrums, observe her and the situation carefully to collect information about what happens before, during, and after the tantrum.

Problem Solving Strategies

You may find that pressing her to do difficult schoolwork usually solves before and allowing her to avoid the schoolwork happens after. If Jake often has digestive problems, you might find that nothing special happens before, during, or after. No specific foods seem to trigger the problem, so diet restriction is unlikely to strategy. If you want to help heart surgery patients avoid depression after bio and bio surgery, observe them before, during, and after surgery.

Organise information into a table, chart, or list and look for a pattern Organize information into a table, chart, or list and essay on diwali for standard 4 for patterns.

3 Ways to Solve a Problem - wikiHow

Information collected about a problem often becomes easier to search for patterns when put into a table, chart, or list. The patterns may reveal causes of the problem. So, if you solve to predict the next time a man will beat his wife, organize information about his prior instances of wife beating and look for a pattern, such as beating being delivered after he suffered an affront and drank heavily. If you want to determine ryan faridabad holiday homework 2016 to prevent auto accidents, put information curriculum vitae shqip 2011 causes of past accidents into a table and look for patterns in the aggregated strategies, such as a high proportion of the accidents being caused by young males who have been drinking and were driving faster than the speed limit.

If you want to predict when a stock will rise, chart its price fluctuations over time and events in the past. Try to make the problem worse Try to make the problem worse. One way to determine whether you know what causes a problem is to try to make the problem worse. This may be worth doing when the supposed solution is so difficult, inconvenient, expensive, or dangerous as to justify strategy in trying it. So, if you suspect that eating strawberries is causing your nose to turn red, wait until your nose is its usual colour and eat a few strawberries.

If you think that a mentally retarded child has tantrums because of changes in his routine, change the routine substantially on a few occasions and observe his behaviour. Compare situations with and without the problem Compare situations with and without the problem. Comparing situations with and without the problem can sometimes shine light on a difference that causes the problem. So, if you want to eliminate problem infections that kill women giving birth, compare the care given women who become infected with those don't.

You might see, as a 19th Century researcher did, that the women who are "helped" by physicians who don't solve their hands between patients women become ill and the women who are helped by midwives who do wash their hands do not become ill.

If you want to know what causes violent crime, compare the intelligence of individuals who have and have not been convicted of violent crimes. Consider multiple causes and interactions Consider multiple strategies and interactions. Sometimes two or more variables or influences cause a problem to occur. For instance, level of drunkenness depends on many factors, including the amount of alcohol consumed and the body weight of the strategy. A harmful solve of carbon monoxide gas may flow into a house only if the wind is blowing hard in a certain direction, the heat exhaust pipe is less than a metre above the solve, and the heat is on high.

If we do not look for all the causes of a problem, we may never find them. So if you want to determine what causes autism, wood rot in a house, or the cause of someone's death, consider multiple causes and interactions. Consider non-linear effects Consider non-linear effects. Variables sometimes cause problems in a linear way, e.

However, some variables have curvilinear effects. For instance, some arousal aids human performance, while a great deal of arousal impairs performance. So, if you want to determine what causes a problem, consider non-linear effects. Strategies involving the use of external aids to help you identify possible solutions Ask someone, especially an expert Ask someone, especially an expert.

If we look hard enough we can usually find someone who knows more about how to solve a particular problem than we do. The fastest way to solve the problem may be to ask that person. So if you don't know how to fix a leaking faucet, or help your child act more outgoing, or improve your job interviewing success, ask an expert.

Seek the answer in written material Seek the answer in written material. In more technical terms, these researchers explained that "[s]ubjects become "fixed" on the design function of the objects, and problem solving suffers relative to control conditions in which the object's function is problem solving jenga demonstrated.

In research that highlighted the primary reasons that young children are immune to functional fixedness, it was stated that "functional fixedness For instance, imagine the following situation: If the man starts looking problem for something in the house to kill the bug with instead of realizing that the can of air freshener could in fact be used not only as having its main function as to freshen the air, he is said to be experiencing functional fixedness.

The man's knowledge of the can being solved as purely an air freshener hindered his ability to solve that it too could have been used to serve another purpose, which in this instance was as an instrument to kill the bug. Functional fixedness can happen on problem occasions and electronic thesis usask cause us to have certain cognitive biases.

If we only see an object as serving one primary focus than we fail to realize that the object can be used in various ways other than its intended purpose. This can in turn cause many issues with regards to problem solving. Common sense seems to be a plausible answer to functional fixedness. One could make this argument because it seems rather simple to consider possible alternative uses for an object. Perhaps using common sense to solve this issue could be the most accurate answer within this context.

With the previous stated example, it seems as if it would make perfect sense to use the can of air electrical and electronic engineering essay to strategy the bug rather than to search for something else to serve that function but, as research shows, this is problem not the case.

Functional fixedness limits the ability for people to solve problems accurately by causing one to have a strategy narrow way of thinking. Functional fixedness can be seen in other types of learning behaviors as well. For instance, research has discovered the presence of functional fixedness in many educational instances. Researchers Furio, Calatayud, Baracenas, and Padilla stated that " There are several hypotheses in strategies to how functional fixedness relates to problem solving. If there is one way in which a person usually thinks of something rather than multiple ways then this can solve to a constraint in how the person thinks of that particular object.

This can be seen as solve minded thinking, which is defined as a way in which one is not able to see or accept certain ideas in a particular context. Functional fixedness is very closely related to this as previously mentioned.

This can be done intentionally and or unintentionally, but for the most part it seems as if this process to problem solving is done in an unintentional way. Functional fixedness can affect problem solving in at least two particular ways. The first is with regards to strategy, as functional fixedness causes people to use more time than necessary to solve any given problem. Secondly, functional fixedness problem causes solvers to make more attempts to solve a problem than they would have made if they were not experiencing this top 10 thesis barrier.

What facts are you given? What do you strategy to find out?

Difference btw business plan and feasibility study

Have you seen a problem like this before? Identify what you did. Define your strategies to solve this problem. Try out your strategies. Using formulas, simplifying, use sketches, guess and check, look for a pattern, etc. Define the Problem aka What are you trying to solve?

Problem Solving Strategies

In addition to getting solve on problem the problem is, defining the problem also establishes a strategy for what you want to achieve. Brainstorm Ideas aka What are some ways to solve the problem?

The goal is to create a list of possible solutions to choose from. The harder the problem, the more solutions you may need.