Hello Babajee, you are most welcome to the forum.
However, the team at
http://3education.mu thinks that your question is quite vague and as such we cannot give you an answer right now unless you re-phrase your question. At first sight, it seems more of a General Paper question than a Mathematics question.
We do understand that its not good just to remember only formulas and replace values in them. A simple example would be, to ue the formula, A= (1/2) * base * height to calculate the area of a triangle. Most students would never try to ponder why we need to put (1/2) and not something else.
You said that learning formulas and APPLYING them to get solutions is not sufficient. Well, if the students can apply a formula to a novel situation, surely she has learn something. Maybe, in Physics, if students just replace values in equations, then I certainly believe its not right because she will then completely miss the objectives of the course.