Effects of Self-Explaining Feedback on Learning from Problem-Solving Errors

We tested two potential ways to help students learn from feedback on their problem-solving errors in physics: (a) design the feedback to align with established principles of multimedia learning (Experiment 1), and/or (b) explicitly prompt students to generate self-explanations of their errors (Experiment 1 and 2). Experiment 1 (n = 131) found no effect of feedback design and limited effects of self-explaining: Self-explaining improved error correction and near (but not far) transfer performance for only one of the feedback conditions. In Experiment 2 (n = 110), we tested a more explicit form of self-explanation support. Students who received scaffolded self-explanation prompts generated higher quality explanations, corrected more errors, and performed better on the near (but not far) transfer test than those who received standard self-explanation prompts or a control group who received no prompts. Students receiving standard self-explanation prompts did not significantly outperform the control group. Overall, this study suggests scaffolded self-explanation prompts help students correct and avoid similar problem-solving errors in the future. © 2024 The Author(s)