No Problem? No Research, Little Learning ... Big Problem!
Fernando Ornelas Marques, Maria Teresa Marques
The motivation to carry out this study stemmed from the
generalized perception that nowadays youth lacks the skills for
the 21st century. Especially the high-level competences like
critical thinking, problem solving and autonomy. Several tools
can help to improve these competences (e.g. the SCRATCH
programming language), but, as researchers and educators, we
are mostly concerned with the skill to recognize problems.
What if we do not find problems to solve? What if we do not
even feel the need to find or solve problems? The problem is to
recognize the problem; the next step is to equate the problem;
finally we have to feel the need to solve it. No need? No
invention. Recognizing a problem is probably the biggest
problem of everyday life, because we are permanently faced
with problems (many ill-defined problems), which we need to
identify, equate and solve. Full Text
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