Enhancing Problem-solving Skills of Pre-service Elementary School Teachers through Problem-based Learning

Problem solving skills are essential to success in a range of activities in everyday life. Graduates with strong problem-solving abilities are life-long learners that are able to critically analyse complex problems. Although developing problem solving skills is often accepted as a desirable goal in many educational settings, there is little evidence that students are graduated as better problem solvers. Traditionally, problem solving has been presented by most of the teachers just after the introduction of the course concepts by solving related problems and then asking students to solve similar problems. As a result, the students can solve routine problems, but they cannot adapt their prior knowledge for the solution of new problems (Hollingworth & McLoughlin 2001). Enhancing the problem solving skills of pre-service teachers by giving them the opportunity to understand the problem solving process may help them improve their students’ problem solving skills.

Problem-based learning (PBL) is one of the recent educational methods promoting problem-solving skills. This approach is often used with collaborative or cooperative-learning strategies and utilizes small student groups of three to six individuals each. In PBL, problems are driving forces for learning. These problems are confronted before the acquisition of all the relevant knowledge. The groups formulate an understanding of the problem and perform research to reach a solution. As a result they acquire both content knowledge and problem solving skills (Littlejohn & Awalt 1999). Research shows that the PBL approach also develops a range of skills including group working and communication (Bernstein, Tipping, Bercovitz, & Skinner 1995, Eng 2000, Gibbon & Wall 2005, Lieux 1996, Lo 2004, Vernon, 1995). Science education in primary school teacher education requires being active and having appropriate affective prerequisites in an inquiry process to solve real life problems. PBL is a good candidate to provide these requirements. There are successful examples in science education research in which PBL is used as an inquiry way to solve real life problems, increase creativity, logical thinking, achievement, attitude and concept learning as an indicators of the quality of science education (Akınoğlu & Tandogan, 2007,Yaman &Yalçın, 2005a,Yaman& Yalçın, 2005b;). Therefore, in science education, problem based learning might provide open-ended, real life situations to experience inquiry and problem solving skills might also be developed with the experience on these problems.

The purpose of the present study is the application of PBL in order to give pre-service elementary school teachers the opportunity to understand the problem-solving process and to foster their problem-solving skills. Hence, to reach the purpose, PBL application through cooperative learning was applied in experimental group whereas the control group students were exposed to traditional learning applications. The main problem is, ‘Is PBL effective on developing pre-service elementary school teachers’ problem solving skills?’ and the sub problems were: (1) Is there any difference with respect to problem-solving skills between the control and experimental group? (2) What are the opinions of the students about the implementation and implications of PBL?