Lesson 4 – New Learning Skills 2

Problem and Task Team

When you are attempting to solve a problem, you draw upon your personal knowledge, skills,
experience, and other resources. There are many problem situations where a team of people work
together, each contributing their knowledge, skills, and experience. One of the reasons that ICT is
such a powerful aid to problem solving is that it facilitates communication and sharing among a
group of people working on a challenging problem. Another reason is that a computer can be thought
of as a member of a team working on a problem. A computer brings certain types of capabilities that
people do not have.
Introduction
Donald Norman is a cognitive scientist who has written extensively in the area of human-
machine interfaces. Norman (1993) begins with a discussion of how tools (physical and mental
artifacts) make us smarter. That is, tools make it possible for us to solve a wide range of intellectual
and physical problems that we cannot solve without the tools.
David Perkins (1992) uses the term "Person Plus" to refer to a person making use of physical
and mental tools. He notes that in many situations, a person with appropriate training, experience,
and tools can far outperform a person who lacks these aids. This is certainly a Big Idea that is
important in both informal and formal education.
Donald Norman, David Perkins, and many others have put forth the idea of a person or team of
people working together with mental and physical tools to solve complex problems and accomplish
complex tasks. In this book I use the term Problem or Task Team (P/T Team) to refer to a person or a
group of people and their physical and mental tools. Figure 4.1 illustrates the P/T Team. The
concepts that make up the diagram are explained in subsequent paragraphs.
Tools to extend Tools to extend
mental physical
capabilities. capabilities.

Proble
m or
Task
Team
Education and training—both formal
and informal—to build mental and
physical capabilities.

Figure 4.1. The P/T Team—People aided by physical and mental tools.
Figure 4.1 shows a person or a group of people at the center of a triangle of
three major categories of aids to posing and solving problems:
1. Mental aids. Even before the invention of reading, writing, and arithmetic about 5,200
years ago, people made use of notches on bones, drawings on cave walls, and other aids to
counting and to keeping track of important events. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are
mental aids. These have led to the development of books, math tables, libraries,
calculators, computers, and many other mental aids. Mental aids supplement and extent
capabilities of a person's mind. In some sense, they can be thought of as an auxiliary brain.
 2. Physical aids. The steam engine provided the power that led to the beginning of the
industrial revolution. Well before that time, however, humans had developed the flint
knife, stone ax, spear, bow and arrow, plow, hoe, telescope, and many other aids to extend
the physical capabilities of the human body. Now we have cars, airplanes, and scanning
electron microscopes. We have a telecommunications system that includes fiber optics,
communications satellites, and cellular telephones.
3. Educational aids. Education is the glue that holds it all together. Our formal and informal
educational systems help people learn to use the mental and physical tools as well as their
own minds and bodies.
Project-Based Learning
Project-Based Learning (PBL) is mentioned a number of times in this book. In PBL, an
individual or a team works on a project over an extended length time. This work leads to a product,
performance, and/or presentation. PBL is one way to create a problem-solving environment in which
a P/T Team works to accomplish a task that is too large for an individual person to accomplish in the
time available.
Teams-based PBL is a challenge both to the teacher and to the team. If a team of people work
together to product a product, how does one assess the individual effort of each student? To what
extent should the teacher attempt to assess learning to be a contributing and facilitating member of a
team? How does a teacher deal with a student who would rather be a “loaner?” How can one give a
test to a class in which different teams of students work on different topics?
Problem-Based Learning
A project in Project-Based Learning need not be rooted in a specific problem that currently
interests a lot of people. Thus, a project might be an exploration of food or medicine available to
soldiers from the South and the North during the US Civil War.
Problem-Based Learning (also abbreviated as PBL) has students or teams of students working
on specific problems. Quite often, the problems are quite specific to the course being taught or the
discipline being studied. The goal is to develop a good solution to a specific problem. Problem-based
learning has a number of the characteristics of project-based learning, but the goal is to produce a
workable solution to a specific problem.
Problem Solving as a Process
Suppose that you are faced by the problem (the task, the assignment, the project) of writing a
four-page essay on a specified topic. The chances are that producing a high quality solution will take
considerable time and effort. It will also take careful thinking and planning.
Over thousands of year, people have studied different ways to approach this problem. In the
mid 1970s, a group of people got together to share their collective knowledge about how to teach and
learn how to write. This led to the creation of the Bay Area Writing Project.