Teaching Problem Solving in Undergraduate Physics Courses: An Endorsement for Deliberate Practice

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that explicit problem-solving frameworks combined with deliberate practice significantly improve undergraduate physics students' problem-solving skills, aligning their approaches more closely with experts compared to traditional methods.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that structured frameworks and targeted feedback enhance problem-solving expertise in physics education, advocating for curriculum integration.

Findings

Students using frameworks and deliberate practice showed expert-like decision patterns.

Structured pedagogies outperform rote repetition in developing problem-solving skills.

Alignment with expert behaviors increased with targeted feedback.

Abstract

Developing expert-like problem-solving skills is a central goal of undergraduate physics education. In this study, we investigate the impact of teaching explicit problem-solving frameworks, combined with deliberate practice, on students' problem-solving approaches. Using multidimensional scaling to analyze students' decision-making patterns, we compare the similarity of students taught with these methods to physics experts and to students taught with traditional repeated practice. Our results show that students who received structured frameworks and targeted feedback through deliberate practice exhibited problem-solving behaviors significantly more aligned with those of experts. These findings suggest that pedagogies emphasizing explicit strategy instruction with feedback are more effective than rote repetition for fostering expertise. We recommend integration of these approaches into physics curricula to better support the development of skilled and adaptive problem solvers.