Supporting student learning from diagnosing erroneous examples when contrasting them with worked examples in the physics classroom

ABSTRACT

Troubleshooting activities require students to diagnose teacher-crafted erroneous examples by detecting and explaining the conceptual errors driving them. In a previous study, the author tested whether diagnosing erroneous examples and then scoring them using a rubric that contained the related worked examples, a step-by-step strategy to solve a problem, would help 8th graders studying simple electric circuits detect and learn from the conceptual errors in the erroneous examples. The findings showed that this graded activity was more effective than the traditional activity with the same worked examples but without rubrics. To determine whether older students with greater metacognitive skills still need the support provided by the graded activity, five 10^th grade advanced physics classes completed a pretest/intervention/posttest after finishing a unit on geometric optics. Students in each class were randomly assigned to the graded (69 students) or the traditional activity (73 students). Students assigned to the graded activity detected and learned more from the conceptual errors in the erroneous examples than students administered the traditional activity. Thus, the findings of the current and the previous studies suggest the greater effectiveness of the graded activity as compared to the traditional activity, regardless of the students’ level of metacognitive awareness or topic.

KEYWORDS:

• Erroneous examples
• peer assessment
• worked examples

Acknowledgements

I wish to express my gratitude to the teachers who participated in this study. I would especially like to thank David Fortus for his valuable support and comments. I appreciate the support of the Academic Arab College for Education in Israel – Haifa, Haifa, Israel.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 d = Cohen’s d effect size. Based on Hattie (1999), an effect size of d ≥ 0.40 is needed for an educational intervention to have practical significance.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Academic Arab College for Education in Israel – Haifa, Haifa, Israel.