Physics Learning in the Context of Scaffolded Diagnostic Tasks (II): Preliminary Results.

In a companion paper we presented self-diagnosis tasks in which students are explicitly required to self diagnose their problem solutions after being given some feedback. In this paper we suggest a rubric to evaluate diagnosis and exemplify its use in two case studies. We present preliminary results regarding how students' performance on the self-diagnosis tasks relates to their performance in solving problems and to their progress during the course. In preliminary analysis, we find that the correlation between students' self-diagnosis grades and their performance in the mid-semester quiz was very low (0.16), the correlation between the grades in the mid-semester quiz and the final exam grades was also low (0.21) while the correlation between the self-diagnosis grades in the mid-semester quiz and the final exam grades was reasonably high (0.68). We suggest that these results can be explained by the hypothesis that the self-diagnosis grades measure the slope of students' learning curve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]