solution, and final checks of the solution. The two group exams contributed a total of 7.5% toward each student’s final grade.
IV. STUDENT SELF-REFLECTIONS
During both the first and last week of the semester students were asked to write a short reflection on their approach to problem solving. The text of the prompt to the students was the same for both reflections:
Please reflect on how you approach physics problems. What methods do you use? What mistakes do you have to watch for? And are these approaches similar to skills that you will need in your future studies or career?
The students received 0.2% of extra credit for each of the two reflections they could submit. Students’ self-reports may not match what they believe and that these self-reflections will likely over-report those beliefs that the students know have been a goal of the course. In addition, there is a broad range of students' sophistication in expressing their problem-solving behaviors which makes it a challenge to extract precise meaning from student reflections. Given that we wanted to explore the impact of problem-solving experiences on a large number of students (∼300) it was not viable to perform one-on-one interviews. We also chose to have the students write open-ended responses to the prompt on problem solving, rather than answering survey questions on a Likert scale[6,13]because there are potential educational benefits to students in the act of