Abstract:
Techniques for generating solutions have been the primary focus of research for ill-structured problems. An important issue, for which there is little research, is how to measure attributes of solutions, such as their quality. This experiment was designed to test the reliability of student's ratings of their solutions to an ill-structured problem, and to compare two problem-solving techniques, brainstorming and hierarchical. Brainstorming has four main rules: defer judgment of ideas, generate as many ideas as possible, write down all ideas, and combine and build on existing ideas. The rules for hierarchical method are: find "general" categories of solutions to the problem, generate new ideas that are "types" of these general categories, and consider the opposites of ideas and general categories. Both of these techniques were used to facilitate the generation of solutions to a problem. Results of this study indicated the number of solutions generated was different for those that brainstormed and those that used the hierarchical technique. The results also indicated that the measure of reliability of student’s solution ratings was statistically significant, but not extremely high. This finding of reliability suggests that in other studies employing participant solution ratings, those ratings were reliable.
