The Impact of Diagnosing Teacher-Made Erroneous Solutions, With the Aid of On-Line Prompts and Feedback, on Students' Diagnostic Skills

An on-line activity was designed to improve students' diagnostic performance in physics problem solving (i.e. their ability to explain mistakes in terms of the misuse of principles applied in an erroneous problem solution). The activity engaged students in diagnosing teacher-made erroneous problem solutions, with the aid of principle-based prompts and feedback. We examined the impact of the on-line activity on students' performance in a more natural F2F setting where students self-diagnose their solutions aided by worked-out examples. Students' learning from the self-diagnosis task was assessed in terms of their performance on transfer problems. We compared students' learning from the self-diagnosis task before and after they experienced the on-line activity. The participants were 11th grade students from the Arab sector in Israel studying the topic of geometrical optics. A detailed analysis of the progression of six students indicated that the online activity did not have a significant impact on their diagnostic skills in the more natural setting. This may have been due to the nature of the students' problem solutions, which were brief, with minimal justifications and rarely explicated the physics principles underlying their solutions. Thus students did not have much to respond to in their self-diagnoses.