  Helping students learn to think like a physicist is an important goal of many
introductory physics courses. One characteristic distinguishing more
experienced physicists from novice students is that they make better use of
problem solving as a learning opportunity. Experts were found to spend more
time than novices in monitoring their work, reflecting upon their possibly
deficient approach to solving a problem, reconsidering their choices as
necessary, and extending and refining their knowledge structure. Moreover,
research on worked-out examples suggests that better performing students are
those who self-explain, that is, elaborate to themselves what they are learning
from those examples, generate inferences, acknowledge mismatches between their
own approach and that of the example, and attempt to resolve conflicts
(self-repair). Indeed, physics instructors often express concern that many
students do not make an effort to learn from their mistakes after the graded
problems are returned to them. Here, we discuss an investigation focusing on
how well introductory physics students self-diagnose their mistakes in their
quiz solutions and its effect on subsequent problem solving in different
interventions.
