“I try to analyze every aspect of the problem and break it down so that each step is simple and it also makes it a lot easier to figure it out. With splitting up problems into smaller pieces it makes any project or problem easier to accomplish and figure out the best solution.”
B. FREQUENCY DISTRIBUTIONS OF STUDENT BELIEFS
All the student reflections were coded by two reviewers as containing one or more limiting or expansive beliefs about problem solving. The distribution of these ideas both at the start and at the end of the semester can be represented by
frequency=(No. of responses containing a category)/(No. of responses).
The average coding of the two raters is used for this normalized frequency. Figure 1 contains the frequency for each category at the start of the semester as a solid histogram (pre) and at the end of the semester as a dashed histogram (post). For example, a frequency of near 0.4 for the strategy “diagrams” postcourse indicates that almost 40% of the reflections contained the idea of drawing diagrams to rerepresent the problem.