Description
You?ll keep building your problem solving skill by exploring more about the process to achieve solutions. You?ll also discover problem solving strategies that will help you succeed in ALEKS, your career, and more.
Whether you?re organizing a conference, trying to win a baseball game, or aiming to reach new clients, a
strategy
is the part of the problem solving process that allows you to think through your course of action to see if it will work. Often too, it?s helpful to try out a number of different strategies in order to discover the best way forward.
For instance, conference developers might consider a number of different versions of their schedule to create the strongest lineup, a baseball team will change their batting order to find the most productive offense, and a new technology company will test out different advertisements to see which one gets the most engagement.
The challenging part of applying your problem solving skill in mathematics is that there?s no one strategy that will work for you every time. Each strategy is like having a different tool in a toolkit. Some tools are better for different jobs than others. So an important part of building your problem solving skill is to collect as many strategies as possible.
Here are a few specific strategies for you to start practicing and using in ALEKS:
1. Draw a picture, diagram, or model
to help you see, understand, and think about the problem you want to solve.
2. Find a pattern
to see if you can make predictions about what will happen again and again in the same way.
3. Act out the problem
?even if it?s just in your mind?to put yourself inside the situation and understand what choices or next steps might be possible. predictions about what will happen again and again in the same way.
4. Work backward
if you already know the end result but need to find out something that happened earlier.
5. Identify the missing information
so you can consider what you need to accomplish to solve the problem.
You may have already realized that you can apply most of the above strategies to problem solving in your personal or professional life as well. For example, if you?re trying to redesign your children?s shared bedroom, drawing a diagram of where you?ll put the beds and dressers will probably help you find the best solution. If you?re countering a job offer with a higher salary request, acting out the conversation might help you understand how to respond if things don?t go your way. Whatever type of problem you?re solving, be sure to try out several strategies to see what works best for you.
Remember, part of problem solving is learning from your mistakes. So, if one strategy doesn?t help you reach a solution, you can save that knowledge to make you more efficient at solving similar problems in the future.
