Developing Problem-solving Approaches to Teaching: Theory and Practice

George Polya’s book, How to solve it (1945), is likely to have been one of the first books to focus on building students’ skills as problem solvers. Polya, a Hungarian professor of mathematics, realised that it was not sufficient that his students knew their mathematical facts--they also needed to have a relational understanding of the subject in order to use mathematics as a tool. While Polya’s book has provided much food for thought for mathematics educators at all levels throughout the decades, the legacy of his writing is in defining a heuristic or framework for students to solve problems.