  "Self-diagnosis tasks" aim at fostering diagnostic behavior by explicitly
requiring students to present diagnosis as part of the activity of reviewing
their problem solutions. We have been investigating the extent to which
introductory physics students can diagnose their own mistakes when explicitly
asked to do so with different levels of scaffolding support provided to them.
In our study in an introductory physics class with more than 200 students, the
recitation classes were split into three different experimental groups in which
different levels of guidance were provided for performing the self-diagnosis
activities. We present our findings that students' performance was far from
perfect. However, differences in the scaffolding in the three experimental
groups (i.e. providing a correct solution and a self-diagnosis rubric)
noticeably affected the resulting diagnosis.
