Complex Problem Solving: The European Perspective—10 Years After

In Europe, two main approaches have surfaced, one initiated by Donald Broadbent in Great Britain and another started by Dietrich Dorner in Germany. The two approaches have in common an emphasis on relatively complex, semantically rich, computerized laboratory tasks that are constructed to be similar to real-life problems. The chapter describes the historic roots of modern research on complex problem solving (CPS) and establishes a working definition of the concept. It discusses specific issue that has been of interest in the CPS community lately, namely, the question to what extent, if at all, CPS performance might be related to intelligence. The chapter addresses two issues that have begun to attract the interest of researchers in the CPS community and might well guide much of the future research in the area. The two issues are the question of whether CPS is a construct that is independent of other cognitive abilities and the question of the domain specificity of strategies and representations.