Thinking and Problem Solving Questions and Answers

Answer: C

The strategy is providing students with open-ended questions to come up with their own solutions.

Open-ended questions have more than one acceptable answer and invite students to analyse, evaluate and generate ideas, which is the core of critical and creative thinking.

Lecturing with detailed notes, projects built on memorising information and multiple-choice tests of knowledge all centre on reproducing given information rather than producing new ideas.

Answer: C

The question that promotes analytical skills is How have mammals adapted to their environments?

Analysis means breaking information into parts and seeing how they relate. To answer this question a student has to connect features of mammals (fur, body shape, behaviour) with conditions in their environments and reason about why each feature helps survival.

Asking for the definition of a mammal tests only recall. Explaining key characteristics tests understanding of what is already given. Listing examples and non-examples from the textbook is again recall. None of these requires students to analyse relationships.

Answer: D

Teachers should encourage verbalization and promote analogical thinking.

Talking through a problem aloud (verbalization) makes learners aware of their own steps and helps them spot errors. Analogical thinking, recognising that a new problem is like one solved before, lets learners transfer a known solution. Both are well-established aids to problem solving.

Belief perseverance (clinging to beliefs despite contrary evidence) and functional fixedness (seeing an object only in its usual use) are obstacles to problem solving, so A and B are wrong. Option C pairs a useful heuristic with convergent thinking, which narrows towards one answer rather than opening up solutions.

Answer: B

Ramesh is using Metacognition.

Metacognition means thinking about one's own thinking: being aware of how one is learning, monitoring it, and regulating it. Ramesh notices that his attention is wandering and that this is why he is not understanding, and then changes his behaviour by moving to the front. That is monitoring and regulating his own learning.

Rehearsal is repeating information to remember it. Scaffolding is support given by another person. Mnemonics are memory aids such as acronyms. None describes recognising and correcting one's own lapse in attention.

Answer: D

The question that invites critical thinking is 'What are the different ways in which we can solve this?'

An open question with many possible answers asks children to generate, compare and evaluate approaches, which is the heart of critical and divergent thinking.

'Do you know the answer to this?' can be answered yes or no, and 'What is the right answer?' assumes a single correct reply and encourages recall. 'Can you think of a similar situation?' asks for a connection, which is useful, but it does not ask the child to weigh alternative solutions as the keyed question does.

Answer: C

Divergent thinking identifies children who are creative.

J. P. Guilford distinguished convergent thinking, which narrows down to one correct answer, from divergent thinking, which produces many varied and original ideas. Fluency, flexibility and originality in divergent thinking are the standard indicators of creativity, and tests of creativity measure them.

Disability and dyslexia are identified by other assessments, and resilience is the capacity to recover from adversity, not a pattern of thinking.

Answer: D

The one that does not model problem solving is 'Ask questions with convergent answers'.

Convergent questions have a single fixed answer and reward recall, so they do not show children how a problem is explored.

Modelling problem solving means making the process visible: thinking aloud about how you approach a problem, admitting and correcting mistakes, and using the language of thinking ('think', 'ideas', 'trial', 'different answers'). Those three options are all ways of doing so.

Answer: A

Such thinking is called critical thinking.

The definition in the question follows Richard Paul and Linda Elder: critical thinking is self-guided, self-disciplined thinking that attempts to reason at the highest level of quality in a fair-minded way. Its marks are questioning assumptions, judging evidence and staying open to other views.

Complex thinking refers to handling many interrelated ideas, intelligent thinking is a loose everyday phrase, and abstract thinking means reasoning about ideas detached from concrete objects. None of them carries the fair-minded, self-correcting standard in the definition.

Answer: D

Ravi uses heuristics.

A heuristic is a rule of thumb drawn from experience that narrows the search for a solution. Ravi does not test every possible fault in order; he forms a likely hypothesis from the symptoms he has seen before and checks that first. This is quicker but not guaranteed to succeed.

An algorithm is a step-by-step procedure that guarantees a solution if followed exactly. Insight is a sudden grasp of the solution. A mental set is a tendency to keep using an approach that worked before, often a hindrance rather than a strategy.

Answer: C

Divya is using subgoal analysis.

Subgoal analysis (means-ends analysis) is a problem-solving strategy in which a large problem is broken into smaller, manageable intermediate goals, each of which can be achieved in turn. Dividing an assigned job into small tasks she can handle is exactly this.

Functional fixedness is a barrier to problem solving, the inability to see a new use for a familiar object. Reductionism is explaining a complex phenomenon by its simplest parts, a philosophical position rather than a working strategy, and secondary elaboration is a term from Freud's account of dreams.