In our recent work on spatial learning styles, we have been toying with the idea that a learning profile might have more to do with how flexibly one can generate and/or use solutions than with whether they use a particular solution. This has pushed us to think about other issues such as functional fixedness and its relationship to learning strategies. Although we are piloting some tasks we think are valid, we wonder if we might have a bit of functional fixedness in our own thinking. To that end, I thought I would throw this out to the RG community and see what new ideas might crop up.
Thinking this through a little more, we have been looking at tasks that claim to measure "divergent thinking" and similar concepts, but all of these concepts still seem ill-defined, leaving us with potential measures that are also ill-defined. It seems that functional fixedness is a bit more clearly defined because you can set up problems with and without the function introduced (think the candle box problem) and look at the degree to which a given individual might be influenced by the introduction of a primary function as part of the problem. That said, we are still struggling with the best way to try to establish this measure for use as an index of individual differences.
To offer a parallel, in another part of our work, we are interested in critical thinking but again found that we could not really define the construct. To get a closer approximation of a construct that captures what we are after, we drilled down. We decided to try to measure an individual's capacity to make and evaluate inferences. This is still no small feat, but it gave us something we could think about more tangible in terms of developing appropriate measures.
Now, we are looking for something similar on this issue of flexible thinking, divergent thinking, ability to break out of the norm...
Functional Fixedness tasks are to Enlarge the thinking and collaborating activities of the Person-Person or Person-Department or Department-Department Linkage Goals.
This someways empowers employees towards Multi-Skilling and Multi-tasking by the way of scope enlargement.
Functional Fixedness tasks are to Enlarge the thinking and collaborating activities of the Person-Person or Person-Department or Department-Department Linkage Goals.
This someways empowers employees towards Multi-Skilling and Multi-tasking by the way of scope enlargement.
Thinking this through a little more, we have been looking at tasks that claim to measure "divergent thinking" and similar concepts, but all of these concepts still seem ill-defined, leaving us with potential measures that are also ill-defined. It seems that functional fixedness is a bit more clearly defined because you can set up problems with and without the function introduced (think the candle box problem) and look at the degree to which a given individual might be influenced by the introduction of a primary function as part of the problem. That said, we are still struggling with the best way to try to establish this measure for use as an index of individual differences.
To offer a parallel, in another part of our work, we are interested in critical thinking but again found that we could not really define the construct. To get a closer approximation of a construct that captures what we are after, we drilled down. We decided to try to measure an individual's capacity to make and evaluate inferences. This is still no small feat, but it gave us something we could think about more tangible in terms of developing appropriate measures.
Now, we are looking for something similar on this issue of flexible thinking, divergent thinking, ability to break out of the norm...
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