Whereas instructional support of students with regard to the links between different solution
methods has not been found to have considerable effects on students’ performance (Große &
Renkl, 2006; Reed et al., 2012), the complexity of the problems (Reed et al., 2012), the
autonomous development of different solutions, or students’ experience of competence during
problem solving may be valuable factors that inspire students’ learning and performance.
Thus, we posit that the number of solutions developed by students and their experience of
competence have to be taken into account when investigating the effects of prompting students
to construct multiple solutions