Information Processing in Problem Solving

My fascination for problem solving and its processes stem back when I was young. While I was leaving in Sri Lanka, I met people who due to their poverty looked at problems from a different angle. In this country, impoverished families feel blessed and because of this it is natural for them to share whatever small amount of food they have to others. What really transpired in their minds? How important is prior knowledge in problem solving? How does one’s social environment affect one’s perception of problem solving?

In my quest to gain a bit of understanding about this subject, I came across an article on our online database. Take from The Counselling Psychologist “An Information-Processing Approach to Problem Solving” http://tcp.sagepub.com.ezp.waldenulibrary.org/cgi/reprint/15/3/371 , the article explicitly explains how people cope and how they behave in handling problems by using the four major problem solving processes: encoding, goal setting, developing a plan and taking action. The article also talks about how real life problems can be solved best by identifying the characteristics of a specific problem along with its peculiarities and how one’s personality affects one’s perception of handling a problem. It touches on how one uses two types of memory to search for solutions. Furthermore, the article elaborates on John Anderson’s ACT – Adaptive Control of Thought. The theory claims that in problem solving we use three memory systems: working, declarative and procedural. A gradual process of combing these three leads to knowledge compilation wherein the person uses all his acquired information to tackle a problem. The article is rather long but it is easy to read and is well structured.

Initially, I doubted on the usefulness of the article but then realised that it is an integral part of being an Instructional Designer to understand how to comprehend how information processing affects problem solving in an organisation, in a workshop or in writing a training programme. Reading the article brought me back to the essentials of life which after all is what we really want to know.

The second resource I found useful is a page in an Engineering website http://www.engsc.ac.uk/er/theory/problemsolving.asp . I thought it was straight forward as it explained the process of problem solving in a simple way giving examples of simple and complex situations at the end. It had diagrams to illustrate the process and it was focused on the topic. It is closely linked to the above article and is helpful in visualising the crucial points of how to handle a problem especially from an ID point of view. Browsing through the page, I was reminded that our brain multi-tasks and whether we like it or not, it links all information it can gather to make sense and to eventually form a meaningful experience in our mind.