According to the National Curriculum, problem solving is one of the four abilities that Chilean students should learn during the primary and secondary education. In addition, problem solving is crucial to develop the other three, which are reasoning and communicating, representing, and modeling. “It is true that solving problems requires representing and modeling. It also provides excellent opportunities for the communication and the mathematical reasoning, since working in team allows to present results, as well as to reason the methods and the errors that can have been done while finding the solution”, explained the researcher of the Center for Mathematical Modeling (CMM) of Universidad de Chile, Josefa Perdomo. She, along with Cristian Reyes, researcher at the Center for Advanced Research in Education (CIAE, for its acronym in Spanish) and the Departamento de Estudios Pedagógicos, and Patricio Felmer, National Prize of Exact Science and also CMM researcher, created the Initiative Activating Problem Solving in the Classrooms (ARPA, because its acronym in Spanish), which is addressed to more than a thousand of teachers of basic education and students of Pedagogy.
Problem solving seems to be absent at the initial formation. “We do not have a wide research base to state it, but many indirect signs show that it is so. Firstly, the result that our students obtained in the international tests, like PISA, where problem solving has an important influence”, says Felmer, director of this project.
ARPA assists teachers to stimulate problem solving in the classrooms. Thus, the initiative seeks to introduce problem solving as a regular methodology in the way of teaching through workshops. These activities have been already tested in 2014 in different cities of the country with the attendance of one thousand teachers.
Three kinds of workshops are offered, according to duration, aim and participants. RPAula takes place during a weekend and provides an overview of the topic. On the other side, RPContenido, which is held over 25 hours, helps to develop knowledge about a specific part of the curriculum, for instance, fractions. With the third one, RPAula, teachers will be mentored to practice problem solving. So, they will be better prepared to face this ability. During this one-year workshop, classes will be filmed and afterwards analyzed.
More than 200 teachers will participate from Mach in the eleven workshops RPAula. They will be held in Valparaíso, Lo Barnechea, Cerrillos, Concepción and Temuco, among other places. Organizers also expect around 600 teachers to join the RPAcción and more than 200, the RPContenido workshops.
“We are at the beginning of a challenge that aims to impact in a significant number of teachers in all the country and, therefore, in many children. It will improve the learning results of mathematics through the development of abilities that go beyond the school”, concluded Perdomo.
Source: CIAE
