Session F2G 1-4244-1084-3/07/$25.00 ©2007 IEEE October 10 – 13, 2007, Milwaukee, WI 37 th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference F2G-1 Balancing Scaffolding and Complexity in Open Ended Group Projects (OEGPs) Mats Daniels 1 and Amie Hauer 2 1 Mats Daniels, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden, matsd@it.uu.se 2 Amie Hauer, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, ahauer@csom.umn.edu Abstract - There is a gap between the problems our students typically encounter in their education and the problems they are likely to be asked to solve in their future employments. Real-world problems are often ill- structured (open ended) and we argue that working on well-structured problems, as is common in educational settings of today, does not fully prepare students for the problems they will encounter in their professional life. This paper will focus on the use of Open Ended Group projects as an educational setting and address why it can be useful in reaching general goals of engineering education and how scaffolding can balance the inherent complexity of such educational settings. Index Terms – Open ended problems, Ill-structured problem solving, Professional skills, Real-world problems, Theories of learning, Situated cognition. INTRODUCTION Problem solving is considered a fundamental learning activity [1, 2] and is often considered a component of higher order thinking skills. Problem solving requires the solver to be able to recognize problem pieces and gaps, as well to formulate a decision and provide reasoning. As educators, one of our goals is to strive for higher-order critical thinking skills in our students. In educational programmes, the desire for critical thinking skills frequently surfaces in education study programmes. For computing education, the ACM/IEEE Computing Curricula 2001 [3] is a useful guideline whose goals align well with using Open Ended Group Projects (OEGP) [4] in engineering education. In an OEGP environment, learning is seen as a social process in which open ended problems are given focus. An OEGP learning environment can be implemented using pedagogical ideas such as Situated Cognition [5], Practice fields [6], and Communities of Practice [6, 7]. In this setting, the situatedness of the learner, the learning environment, and the problem in context is seen as instrumental to successful learning. Open ended problems are often "ill-structured", i.e. where goals or bounds are unspecified, unclear or insufficient in various ways and are considered to be more complex, more open ended, and also more real-world or indeterminate in their end goals in comparison to “well-structured” problems [1, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12]. Also, ill-structured problems have no clear or distinct solution, but rather have an array of various solutions that may be used to resolve the problem, just as would happen in professional settings later. COMPLEXITY CONCERNS An important aspect regarding open ended (ill-structured) problems is knowledge of human cognition. Learning how to solve open ended problems may be considered a skill just as important as reaching a solution. This is crucial because it appears that novices have a choice of either focusing on goal attainment (solving the problem) or learning how to solve the problem (schema acquisition) [1]. The competition between these competing goals (bearing in mind that novices must spend more time in information-search because their domain knowledge is less) sometimes induces learners to solve the problem at the expense of acquiring schemas that they may then apply to future problems [11]. Some recent work on problem representation focuses on problem recognition (deep vs. surface) and problem transfer [1]. Learning how to resolve ill-structured problems is important for critical thinking skills and part of the OEGP process. Even so, there are some critics of environments using open-ended problems as a way to teach how to resolve open- ended problems. One criticism is the use of minimal guidance methods in letting students be responsible for their own learning, e.g. Kirchner et.al. [13]. The core of this argument is that a deep and thorough understanding of something is essential in order to use the knowledge, and that the minimal guidance approach is ineffective for transferring knowledge into long-term memory. This critique is useful and need not be discarded, but rather can be used as inspiration for setting up a learning environment that takes into account scaffolding and knowledge of human learning. Preexisting knowledge and skills are an important component of being able to resolve open ended problems successfully. This can be supplemented by research on expert and novice differences [14] as well as statements in Kirschner et.al. [13] indicating that scaffolding is most useful when aligned with the students skill/ability level. We argue that balanced scaffolding can be a strategy to address differing skill levels and still achieve higher order thinking skills through using ill-structured problems. Successful scaffolding in OEGP is built from careful case selection, an understanding of knowledge prerequisites for the course, and the ability to draw upon students’ previous learning experiences.