THE HYPOTHESIS-TESTING FRAMEWORK TO GUIDE PROBLEM UNDERSTANDING

"Even a small number o f observations may suggest an explanation — a hypothesis or theory" (Dewey, .1933, p. 151),

When an educational psychologist first begins work with a teacher in exploring the problem situation there is often very little information available to them. Yet despite this lack o f detailed information the educational psychologist is able to generate a range of initial and tentative guiding hypotheses. These hypotheses assist the educational psychologist in transforming the initial problem state into a series of better structured subproblems. An hypothesis provides the interviewer with a set o f conceptual boundaries

into which he or she can locate, sort and compare case details given to them by the teacher. If a given hypothesis is accurate then certain case facts and further questions will follow. Each hypothesis guides the collection of information which is then used to either support or disconfirm its accuracy (Halliday, 1985; Morton & Frith, 1995).

Hypotheses are developed by the educational psychologist from stores of knowledge and experience held in long-term memory which are referred to in this thesis as content-guides (as this is the terminology used within the problem analysis framework), but are more commonly called schemata (Anderson, Spiro & Anderson, 1978; Wilden & La Gro, 1998). A schemata is a metaphor for an internal "organising framework o f knowledge about a specific domain which both influences the use of information and also filters out irrelevancies that structure the 'sense making' cognitions o f the person" (Wilden & La Gro, 1998, p. 177). Schemata provide a means by which incoming information can be organised, matched and checked. Schemata evolve with experience, becoming more elaborate, organised and easily accessed. Such content- guides consist o f the body o f knowledge in psychology (and other domain specific information), available to the interviewer, experience with similar or related problems, and other knowledge. The content-guides assist the interviewer to construct questions and to see relationships, patterns and connections between what initially may seem to be unrelated chunks o f information (Glaser, 1984).

Hypothesis-testing as a cognitive strategy provides a means for the interviewer to transform the initial problem state into a series of structured propositions leading towards a solution state. It also provides the interviewer with a conceptual framework within which to. integrate and manage the potentially large amount of information provided by the teacher. Elstein et al (1990) provide some support for this view that sequential hypothesis testing accounts for the way that medical practitioners reach a diagnose o f a patient's problem. In a study o f medical consultations, doctors generated initial hypotheses, collected data to test these hypotheses out, and then moved onto another hypothesis and began the process over again. Interestingly, the choice of hypotheses appeared to be a selective process with all the doctors choosing only about a third of the potential hypotheses available to them, as identified by a panel of "experts".

educational psychologist may start the interview with two initial guiding hypotheses: "The difficulties that the teacher is experiencing with managing the boy's behaviour may be due to the fact that the boy's behaviour is extreme and disturbed" and "The teacher, who is in her second year of teaching, may not be very skilful in managing the boy's behaviour". Such hypotheses immediately reduce the initial problem state to a search for data around the behaviour o f the boy and the teacher's responses to it. As in Elstein et al's (ibid) study the hypotheses generated will guide what questions are asked and the information obtained will be matched to each hypothesis to test its relevance.

Within the complex knowledge domain of medicine, a diagnosis is reached by eliminating competing hypotheses and choosing one that best fits the symptoms currently presented. The kinds o f problems with which educational psychologists work often involve complementary rather than competing hypotheses. Personal and job-related problems are often connected, with difficulties in one area influencing other aspects o f functioning. A doctor is looking for one or two solutions to a problem, whereas the educational psychologist is trying to identify a range of different aspects o f the problems, and is trying to see how these separate dimensions might be linked. Such a task poses great demands on the interviewer's working memory.

The medical context also benefits firom having a large and robust body o f facts which highlights the relationship between particular symptoms and diagnoses. Hypothesis testing involves the doctor in matching hypotheses against presenting symptoms. The doctor can, with some degree of confidence, group specific data under diagnostic labels (e.g., "absence of white patches on the red blotches on the tongue means not Candida albicans but more likely either geographical tongue or an allergic reaction"). Educational psychologists on the other hand must retain the information given to them by the teacher in order to construct an integrating hypothesis which is unique to that specific teacher's problem situation.

The discussion so far has not provided answers to the central question o f what behaviours differentiate expert from novice problem solvers. Previous sections have highlighted that novice problem solvers do not appear to lack problem-solving frameworks, and that the use o f these does not necessarily guarantee success (Elstein et al, 1990; Lichtenberg, 1997). What then are the factors which could account for these

differences? The next section reviews research on expert and novice problem solvers and concludes by offering some answers to this question.

2.7. THE CHARACTERISTICS OF EXPERT AND NOVICE PROBLEM