“I should write down all the known and unknown variables, while figuring out their relationships or interactions. I found that writing out all the information I was given—then used it to find all the new information I could find using equations (or if I could see far enough ahead, only what I knew I would need).”
Prior examples in text or lecture. In this strategy students search for similar examples in a text or other resource. From the reflections it is not always possible to identify how a given students uses prior examples, whether they look for problems with similar surface features, or problems that employ the same principles. We coded for this strategy if the reflection described the process of copying or minimally adapting the worked examples to the problem at hand. We note that students whose reflections were coded as searching for prior examples rarely contained mention of more expansive strategies (see later in this section) such as trying to understand the concepts or qualitatively analyzing the problem. The correlation coefficient between “prior examples” and “concepts” is 0.02 indicating that these two codings are independent, while the correlation coefficient between “prior examples” and “qualitative analysis” is −0.1 indicating that if students mention prior examples they are less likely to describe a qualitative analysis in their reflections.
The strategy of prior examples was classified as limiting because students who employ such a strategy may struggle on