The student reflections were examined for strategies that they use as they start and work their way through problems. Some student reflections mentioned strategies they use at the end of problems, e.g., reviewing their work, but these were infrequent and are not the focus of this paper. Four categories of “limiting” ideas or problem-solving strategies were identified in student reflections: the phrase “limiting”[76] is chosen because these strategies may work well for well-structured, end-of-chapter exercises, but they begin to fail as the problems become more complex, and will not work for more ill-structured or open-ended problems. From the student reflections we also identified four categories of “expansive” ideas. The term “expansive” was chosen because these approaches to problems can be readily applied to more ill-structured challenges, and these strategies have also been identified as characteristic of expert problem-solving approaches. The limiting and expansive categories are listed in Table I and described more fully via representative examples of student reflections are given below (without spelling or grammar corrections).
TABLE I.
Categories used to code student reflections. κ values for inter-rater reliability are listed below each category.
Limiting Strategies Expansive Strategies