Problem-solving skills empower students to deal with challenges efficiently, think critically, and craft effective solutions. This translates to their academic success and fosters their adaptability, resilience, and critical thinking, all required to thrive in the ever-changing professional world. This study investigates the effectiveness of guided discovery and scaffolding strategies in enhancing problem-solving skills among students in Physics courses in Saudi technical and vocational colleges. Those pedagogical strategies aim to create higher-order thinking skills required for problem-solving within technical and science education, as well as in the professional life that the students must live after leaving college. Correspondingly, we designed a quasi-experiment with a pre- and post-intervention assessment involving 104 students enrolled in a Physics course within a technical diploma program. The results indicated a significant difference in students' problem-solving skills between those instructed in the traditional teaching condition and those who received guided discovery and scaffolding strategies as major instructional components. The findings suggest that guided discovery and scaffolding improve students' problem-solving skills and promote their engagement and motivation to develop effective solutions. This study contributes to developing existing literature on successful teaching strategies in technical and science education. It also provides practical implications for educators seeking to establish problem-solving competencies among students. © 2024 University of Helsinki. All rights reserved.
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