How Teachers Can Facilitate Problem Solving Development

Introduction: Shared activities with peers provide children with opportunities to learn, practice, and develop their communicative, interactive, and social skills. At ages 2-4, children are still developing in all of these domains, therefore their problem solving skills are not yet efficient. For example, toddlers have limited awareness of another’s point of view, therefore limiting their social problem solving abilities. Toddlers also lack the language skills needed to communicate in social situations, further limiting those problem solving abilities. For this reason, it is important to look at how teachers can facilitate problem-solving development in children these ages. In order to do this, one must first determine how children ages†¦show more content†¦This study was conducted with the premise that preschoolers may use metacognitive strategies to varying degrees. The children were presented with two different situations to assess their problem solving skills. The results from the study suggest that preschoolers do in fact use metacognitive strategies to problem solve, and use five different strategies. These strategies include recognition of the problem, subtractive restructuring, self-monitoring, motivation to persist, and planfulness. Recognition of the problem refers to the understanding and ability to identify the problem presented. Children used subtractive restructuring to undo the problem and reposition the pieces in a different, corrected placement in an attempt to reason. Self-monitoring refers to a form of verbal self-correction, and consisted of thinking out loud and random trial and error. Motivation to persist refers to the child’s ability to stay focused on the task, maintain awareness of the overall goal, willingness to try new ideas while enjoying the task. The final strategy, planfulness, refers to the ability of the child to make planned decisions. Specifically, this occurs when the child’s actions were consistently geared towards a goal (Lambert, 2001). The second article reviewed was about gender influences on preschooler’s problem-solving strategies. The study looked at the influence of gender on both the nature and