TITLE:
Students’ Self-Diagnosis Using Worked-Out Examples
AUTHORS:
Rafi’ Safadi, Edit Yerushalmi
KEYWORDS:
Problem Solving; Worked-Out Example; Self-Diagnosis; Self-Repair
JOURNAL NAME:
Creative Education,
Vol.4 No.3,
March
25,
2013
ABSTRACT: Students in
physics classrooms are often asked to review their solution to a problem by
comparing it to a textbook or worked-out example. Learning in this setting
depends to a great extent on students' inclination forself-repair; i.e., their willingness and ability to recognize
and resolve conflicts between their mental model and the scientifically
acceptable model. This study examined the extent to which self-repair can be
identified and assessed in students’written responses
on a self-diagnosis task in which they are given time and credit for
identifying and explaining the nature of their mistakes assisted by a
worked-out example. Analysis of 180 10th and 11th grade
physics students in private and public schools in the Arab sector in Israel
showed that although most students were able to identify differences between
their solution and the worked-out example that significantly affected the way
they approached the problem many did not acknowledge the underlying conflicts
between their interpretation and a scientifically acceptable interpretation of
the concepts and principles involved. Rather, students related to the
worked-out example as an ultimate template and simply considered their
deviations from it as mistakes. These findings were consistent in all the
classes and across all the teachers, irrespective of grade level or school
affiliation. However, younger students in some classrooms also perceived the
task as a communication channel to provide feedback to their teachers on their
learning and the instructional materials used in the task. Taken together, the
findings suggest that instructional intervention is needed to develop students’
ability to self-diagnose their work so that they can learn from this type of
task.