OPEN-ENDED QUESTIONS IN OR/MS EDUCATION

This article surveys the mathematics education research in an area of importance to OR/MS and OM educators: the value of open-ended questions and activities. This literature, broadly summarized, states that open-ended problems promote deeper student learning, heightened student confidence, and more conceptual (less mechanical) understanding that students more easily apply in unfamiliar contexts. Assessing student learning with open-ended questions has been shown to give teachers better insights into what students do and do not know, as well as the quality of their own instruction. After addressing the costs and potential risks of adopting open-ended questions in the classroom, the paper concludes with a survey of more than a dozen ways that instructors can expand the types of "closed" problems that appear in most OR/MS and OM textbooks.