their new fledgling strategies. In Higgins’ study[57] students worked on complex problems over the course of a week while receiving support from the teacher and engaging in classroom discussions on different problem-solving strategies. Compared to a control group, students at the end of the year reported stronger beliefs that mathematics was more than memorizing facts and procedures, and that they could develop knowledge and understanding through their efforts rather than relying on an authority figure. Similar success in improving students’ beliefs by using nonroutine, complex problems was reported with elementary and middle school children by Verschaffel,[58] Mason and Scrivani,[59] and Liu.[60] In addition, research shows that internships[20] and open-ended project-based[27,61] experiences taken by college students have impacted students’ beliefs about problem solving. The authors in these papers conjecture that the ambiguous context of the tasks caused the students to think about their STEM knowledge in more complex ways.
B. CREATING EPISTEMIC DOUBT IN LARGE INTRODUCTORY UNIVERSITY COURSES
For large introductory science courses it is difficult to implement project-based experiences[27,61]due to large staffing and time demands. An alternative that may impact students’ beliefs on problem solving and still fit within a course structure of lectures and recitations is the use of multifaceted