Learning from troubleshooting activities when contrasting erroneous examples with worked examples in the physics classroom

Abstract

Research indicates that troubleshooting activities that require students to reflect on pre-prepared erroneous examples, i.e. erroneous solutions to problems that correspond to common naïve ideas, impact their learning positively. These include asking students to diagnose erroneous examples; in other words, detect the conceptual errors and then explain why these errors are wrong. One of the major challenges is to determine the best ways to support student learning with troubleshooting activities. One suggestion involves contrasting erroneous examples with worked examples through a step-by-step demonstration of how to solve a problem. Here, a new troubleshooting activity designed to prompt students to learn more effectively from erroneous examples is described and assessed. The worked examples only constitute one part of the rubric, and students are required to both diagnose erroneous examples and then score them. Six 8th grade classes from three schools (two classes each from a different school taught by the same teacher) completed a pre-test/intervention/post-test after finishing a unit in simple electric circuits. In the intervention, in each school, one class was randomly assigned to the new activity (45 students) and the other class to the traditional troubleshooting activity with worked examples without rubrics (46 students). The findings suggest that the new activity enabled more students to learn from the erroneous examples than the traditional activity, regardless of whether the students’ naïve ideas resembled the ones committed in the erroneous examples, and confirm the effectiveness of the new activity in 8th graders studying simple electric circuits. In a companion study by the first author (under review), the findings confirmed the effectiveness of the new activity in 10th graders studying geometric optics. Taken together, the findings of both studies may suggest that regardless of grade level or topic, the potential of learning from troubleshooting activities can be exploited effectively by implementing scoring erroneous examples along with a rubric portraying worked examples.