Can majoring in computer science improve general problem-solving skills?

Abstract

Teaching students to become skillful problem solvers is a goal of university education, but it has been difficult to measure such skill or demonstrate the benefits of particular educational experiences. This paper presents a study of college students solving a problem unrelated to their academic majors. The analysis suggests that the educational experiences of Computer Science (CS) students may better train them in problem-solving than the experiences of other majors. In this study, students from a variety of undergraduate majors and grade levels were given a 15-minute problem-solving task embedded in an interactive science simulation. The complex task calls upon many problem-solving practices needed by scientists and engineers in their professions. Although this task has little resemblance to the problems encountered in a computer science course, CS students performed significantly better than students in any other major. In addition, only for CS students was there an indication of improvement in problem-solving from lower to upper grade levels. We propose that general problem-solving and computational thinking share some common practices, such as problem decomposition and comprehensive data collection. Furthermore, we present preliminary evidence that training in computational thinking is transferable to problem-solving tasks across domains and discuss how the unique features of CS programming assignments could be generalized to other science and engineering courses to foster students' general problem-solving skills.