Problem Tree Analysis: demystifying critical thinking through systematic analysis

by Deb Catavello

“Complete, relevant, fairly sophisticated response to task”. This is how the first descriptor in the 70s band of the International Foundation Programme (IFP) marking criteria reads. But what do these words – to which we could add “criticality”, “thorough” “in-depth” “systematic” analysis – mean to my students on the IFP? Although we’d discussed some of this language in class – sometimes using this visual of Bloom’s taxonomy – I wanted to provide my IFP students with a toolkit they could use to go about doing analysis.

Teaching how to go about doing “things” seems to me an important aspect of what I do as an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) teacher. This is also something that I’ve recently started emphasising more in my classes: research is for me one of the key differences between secondary and tertiary education, so I often tell my students that part of what they’re learning on the IFP is to do with “being systematic when doing research”. And approaching research (systematically) does require the mastering of a few skills: engaging with texts, note-taking, planning/synthesising, structuring an argument, analysing etc., and so we teach students about Social Annotation, Cornell Method, Synthesis Matrices, Toulmin’s Model and, more recently, Problem Tree Analysis.

I first came across Problem Tree Analysis (PTA) – also known as Root Cause Analysis – last year when researching how I could better support students develop their analytical skills. PTA is a project planning approach popular among development agencies (e.g. the International Institute for Sustainable Development). In a PTA, individuals work together to break down an issue into its causes and effects (see Fig.1 and Fig.2). More information on PTA is available here.

I’ve recently had the opportunity to incorporate PTA in a lesson where my students had to explore complex problems within the context of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. This group project is then expected to feed into the submission of students’ first extended writing task: an SPSE (Situation Problem Solution Evaluation) essay. In the week leading to the lesson in question, students had been reading about their chosen problems so were able to start analysing them in a more structured way. And this is where PTA came into play.

I briefly introduced this framework and then asked students to work “backwards” by arranging the main ideas discussed in the Problem section of a student sample essay, which we had read the previous week, into a Problem Tree. I projected the main ideas and instruction in Fig. 3 on the screen and then handed out A3 sheets and post-it notes, so students could create the Problem Trees in groups. What I wanted to elicit was that in the sample the student hadn’t discussed the effects sufficiently nor had they developed one of the main points and, perhaps more importantly, they hadn’t clarified whether there were any primary and secondary causes.

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In the table below are the main ideas/points discussed in the problem section of one of the samples about the gap in performance between pupils from different socioeconomic backgrounds (we read this in Week 7).

1. Work with your group to re-arrange them in a Problem Tree.
2. Discuss the following question:

• What aspects of the problem could the student have discussed in more depth?

Low performance of students from low socioeconomic background	Ineffective policy programmes e.g. “tracking systems”
Segregation	Schools’ admission policies (Cullinane, 2020)
Family background (Karsten, 2010, p. 193)	Income (Chmielewski, 2019)

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In the main stage of the lesson, the students worked with their chosen problems and mapped them onto their own Problem Trees. Here are my students’ trees:

 

I believe that both the visual element and the metaphorical language that goes with it (e.g., digging down to the root/underlying causes, in-depth/shallow/superficial analysis) proved very useful in clarifying expectations, thereby developing students’ assessment literacy. For example, one group realised they could not differentiate between primary and secondary causes, nor could they add “enough branches” to their trees so decided they needed to do more reading. If they hadn’t realised this, these students might have ended up submitting an incomplete or unsophisticated (50s band descriptor) or even minimal (40s band) response to task.

Another group experimented with different ways of framing the problem by moving the post-it notes around, which led to a discussion on how the framing of an issue is in itself an expression of critical thinking and that an additional tree could grow out of a root, so to speak. Observing students work on their trees, I could see that “the heart of the exercise [was] the discussion, debate and dialogue that [was] generated as factors [were] arranged and re-arranged, often forming sub-dividing roots and branches” (ODI, 2009).

Finally, another group couldn’t add any citations to their post-it notes (this is a twist to the original exercise which I added as I have been hammering into students the need to ensure their writing is informed by their reading) so (hopefully!) understood that they need to be more systematic when taking notes. What made the exercise so effective was the fact that by having individual ideas on separate post-it notes, students could apply some key critical thinking skills (comparing, ranking, sorting, grouping etc.) which were then practised further in the last stage of the session where students had to answer the discussion questions below:

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Discussion questions might include:

• Does this represent the reality? Are the economic, political and socio-cultural dimensions to the problem considered?
• Which causes and consequences are getting better, which are getting worse and which are staying the same?
• What are the most serious consequences? Which are of most concern? What criteria are important to us in thinking about a way forward?
• Which causes are easiest / most difficult to address? What possible solutions or options might there be? Where could a policy change help address a cause or consequence, or create a solution?
• What decisions have we made, and what actions have we agreed on?

Figure 5 – Discussion questions https://mspguideorg.files.wordpress.com/2022/03/14msp_tools_problem_tree_14.pdf

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Obviously, a tree might be limited in its potential to represent problems. What about those issues prone to vicious cycles where the effect soon becomes a cause? A node diagram would have probably worked better. Nevertheless, I think I will use PTA again as it is an approach adopted by the very people who are trying to achieve the UN Sustainable Goals. Next time, however, I’ll make sure not to bin those A3 sheets immediately after the lesson. In hindsight, I could have used those trees to include some language input in a subsequent lesson (this is EAP after all!). Something to bear in mind for next time.

References

ODI (2009). Planning tools: Problem Tree Analysis [online] Available at: <https://odi.org/en/publications/planning-tools-problem-tree-analysis/> [Accessed: 30 November 2022]

Wageningen (n.d.). The MSP Guide: How to design and facilitate multi-stakeholder partnerships [online]Available at: <https://mspguideorg.files.wordpress.com/2022/03/14msp_tools_problem_tree_14.pdf > [Accessed: 30 November 2022]