Understanding and enhancing students’ use of evaluation strategies during physics problem solving through reflective prompts

The Disciplinary Learning Companion (DLC) is an online reflection tool designed to enhance students’ engagement in metacognitive activities during physics problem solving. It achieves this through providing reflective discipline- and topic-specific prompts on the solving process. This study focuses on evaluation strategies and aims to understand whether, how, and when students use evaluation strategies during physics problem solving, whether the DLC’s reflective prompts trigger the use of evaluation strategies and the extent to which this use is transferred to future problem solving. A total of twelve first-year bioscience engineering students each participated in four think-aloud interviews over a four weeks period. In these interviews, the students first solved a physics problem and then reflected on it supported by the DLC. This study focuses on students’ use of evaluation activities as part of their metacognitive process. To assess students’ current metacognitive levels, we examined the evaluation strategies they used spontaneously. In addition, we evaluated the impact of the DLC by studying the evaluation strategies students used after being prompted and those transferred to subsequent problem-solving attempts. The analysis revealed that students spontaneously applied evaluation strategies to numerical problems but rarely to symbolic problems. The DLC’s reflective prompts successfully triggered the use of evaluation strategies, though infrequently. Similarly, there were few instances of transferring evaluation strategies from one think-aloud interview to another.