Numerical Methods Through Open-Ended Projects

What's Brewing? A Statistics Education Discovery Project

“…For example, they give students the opportunity to be creative in the type of approach to sampling and data collection and analysis used (Silver 1997;Sole 2016a). In addition, because they are not proscriptive, they better represent the type of problems encountered in the real-world (Cline 2005;Sole 2016aSole , 2016b. Given the level of the students in this course, however, providing more specific directions in a stepwise fashion was viewed as more appropriate.…”

Multiple Problem-Solving Strategies Provide Insight into Students’ Understanding of Open-Ended Linear Programming Problems

“…One way to elicit a more varied range of responses and, as a result, provide a more accurate and complete picture of students' understanding and thinking is to use open-ended questions [16]. Whereas closed-ended questions require the application of a specific algorithm to solve a problem that has one solution, open-ended questions afford students the opportunity to use multiple approaches to solve a problem [4,10,14,29]. In some cases, these can have a range of correct solutions [10,29].…”

“…Additionally, because students learn and integrate knowledge in different ways, multiple problem-solving strategies allow students to perform to the best of their abilities by affording them the opportunity to play to their strengths to demonstrate their understanding. Open-ended problems can also be helpful in revealing students' misconceptions because they lack the clues that are often found in textbook exercises that essentially tell students how to proceed [4].…”

“…The experience of seeing different strategies and discussing various approaches makes students aware of alternative strategies and helps increase their understanding of different methods, which has the potential to make students more flexible problem solvers in the future [26]. Seeing the diverse range of approaches their peers had taken to solve problems motivates students to look for alternative approaches [4].…”

“…If strategies are overlooked, this might not be just a preference; this might indicate that a particular problem-solving strategy was not fully understood. As a result, these types of problems can be effective in revealing students' misconceptions [4].…”