Learning from mistakes: The effect of students' written self-diagnoses on subsequent problem solving

TL;DR

This study investigates how students' written self-diagnoses of their mistakes influence their ability to learn from errors and improve subsequent problem-solving in physics courses.

Contribution

It introduces and evaluates interventions that enhance students' self-diagnosis skills and examines their impact on learning outcomes in physics problem solving.

Findings

Self-diagnosis improves subsequent problem-solving performance.

Interventions that guide self-diagnosis lead to better error recognition.

Students who effectively self-diagnose show increased conceptual understanding.

Abstract

Helping students learn to think like a physicist is an important goal of many introductory physics courses. One characteristic distinguishing more experienced physicists from novice students is that they make better use of problem solving as a learning opportunity. Experts were found to spend more time than novices in monitoring their work, reflecting upon their possibly deficient approach to solving a problem, reconsidering their choices as necessary, and extending and refining their knowledge structure. Moreover, research on worked-out examples suggests that better performing students are those who self-explain, that is, elaborate to themselves what they are learning from those examples, generate inferences, acknowledge mismatches between their own approach and that of the example, and attempt to resolve conflicts (self-repair). Indeed, physics instructors often express concern that many students do not make an effort to learn from their mistakes after the graded problems are returned to them. Here, we discuss an investigation focusing on how well introductory physics students self-diagnose their mistakes in their quiz solutions and its effect on subsequent problem solving in different interventions.