Intuitively, the final component of the problem solving process as suggested by Bransford
and Stein (1993) appears to be an obvious final stage. However, they state that in their research
they often find that students quite often stop at the anticipation and acting component and fail to
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look back and learn from their experiences in solving a problem. They do not look at their
performance and fail to learn from their successes or failures. When one fails to do this they also
often do not see possible flaws in their solutions or may miss out on realizing other possible
strategies that improve on their previous solutions. By looking back on their experiences they may
see generalizations that can be made to future problems and that improve on their overall abilities
as problems solvers. The IDEAL model is not always a linear process and actually should be
considered cyclic in that it is often necessary to look back and possibly renter different stages to
redefine and improve on previous attempts at problem solution. This last component is often where
one sees the need to do this.