We Should Give Messy Problems And Make Students Reflect On What They Learn

We often give students large projects because solving them teaches students so much. If we give them messy problems with a lot of structured ambiguity, we can make it so that they learn even more because they will have to really think about the problems they are solving. This concept is often applied through project/problem-based learning. If only this were true, we could just give our students a lot of poorly defined problems and in so doing create extremely competent graduates. The idea breaks down because we as faculty think about how much students will learn from the process and gain insight through doing, while students tend to focus on their final product/grade and ignore the journey. Students learn a lot but not as much as they could. The problem is not with the projects and their intrinsic messiness but instead with our students' focus. We propose the concept of messy learning, which couples project/problem-based learning with reflection to solve this problem. Messy learning involves giving deliberately ambiguous problems where we want students to focus on learning about how to solve the ambiguous parts of the problem. Reflection is the method that we propose to use to make the messy learning projects effective for our students by using it to focus attention on appropriate parts of the messy problems.