In the health sciences, students are often presented with case study problems. These are essentially a case where you'll have a story about a patient, what's wrong with them, what their social history is, and then you have to use information that's provided in the case study to paste together further connections. So you're not just telling me this person has atherosclerosis, for example, and this is what atherosclerosis is, but you might be saying. This person is a smart guy, they have a stressful lifestyle and that actually is contributing. So you're actually starting to build connections and you're actually telling a story about what you're saying in the information presented. The reason students are given case studies is because we want them to actually think about the problem in a lot more depth. So obviously if I just said learn what atherosclerosis is or learn about heart disease, you might just look that up in a textbook, whereas this is actually helping you to draw deeper connections. So by doing so you have to think not just what this word means but how does it relate to other issues that has been presented in this case. So it's helping students actually draw a really deep connections that really strengthens their learning and so they don't just learn the language but they also learn how these different conditions all interconnect. Often when we learn the body, we learn these systems in isolation whereas case-based studies brings all these different systems like the circulatory system, the respiratory system altogether so we can see the body working as one unit. In physics, many of the problems we give our undergraduates are a word problem or a small paragraph sitting out some physical situation and you will be asked to interpret that situation, either explain what is happening, the physics behind the situation as described or more often predict what's going to happen next. You're given the information in the setup and you're asked to say; Well, because of the physics I know, this is what is going to happen next. For instance, you might be asked a goalkeeper is trying to clear the ball down a soccer field. If he kicks the ball at such and such a speed at such and such an angle, how far down the field will the ball travel? It's a word problem but there's physics embodied in it. In particular, undergraduate students in my field are asked: What is the problem with this patient or how do we diagnose this patient's complaint? After that, they're asked: How do we treat these patients complaint? At a research level, they're asked: Well, if there isn't evidence out there that helps you treat this patient, how do you create new evidence? Finally, and I think really most importantly, how do you convert the knowledge that you have, the technical knowledge, and implement that for the specific patient so that patient has a good outcome? One example of a problem that could be set early in an undergraduate education degree is around designing a curriculum, an intended curriculum, for a group of children or young people. To think about that problem means that students would need to read widely about; first of all, what the word curriculum actually means because it means different things to different people, then I would need to think about what approach they would like to take, and they would need to think about a whole set of learning experiences perhaps both formal and informal that they might like to implement. They would need, I guess, to imagine the kinds of learning needs so that group of children or young people might have and they would need to think about the thoughts of assessment strategies that might be most useful to look at how much learning happened in that particular context, and then they would need to think about evaluation strategies from the perspective of the actual curriculum experiences they designed. Undergraduate students in physics get two broad classes of questions. The first ones are qualitative questions and they are off the type imagine some situation and we increase the temperature, what would happen, and the students are asked to predict whether something goes up or down or stays the same. The second type of question is quantitative. You have a question in analogy to what I said earlier, the temperature goes up by 10 degrees, what happens to such and such and what is expected there is a numerical answer. They really test different things. The first one test your general understanding of the physics subject. The second one really tests whether you can express that understanding in terms of numbers because, as I mentioned earlier, ultimately you'll compare your predictions and your understanding with the results of experiment. So in the experiments something happens when you raise the temperature by 10 degrees and if all is willed your understanding is such that you can predict that number with some accuracy. I teach in the introduction to nursing practice unit, which is the first unit that the students are introduced into nursing practice in their degree. What we do is create a practice development portfolio that has a number of aspects. It has three aspects, two aspects are reflection and the third aspect they develop an evidence-based poster which is on one of their clinical skills that they had learned and it really focuses on their learning rather than their practice. So it's looking at what did they give a description of their learning and then they have to analyze that learning and then give strategies of how this is going to relate to the clinical area and strategies for improvement in their learning in the future. So they do that on a weekly basis across the semester. I've work in education, where it's a mixture of theory and practice and a lot of the assignments, a lot of the ideas start with case studies. They might be case studies of individual students or schools or of issues and the students are given a description and then a question on what would you do. Now it's not just what they would do, this is where they have to bring in the theory. So they must show their knowledge of the reading. So it's really working from practice to theory. That's how problem-solving comes in.
