Post-practice reflection

Brief statement of principle

Post-practice reflection involves activities that follow successful completion of a quantitative problem aimed at helping students to understand the concepts associated with that problem and to develop abstract problem-solving schema. Such schema are a kind of knowledge component that if acquired with high feature validity will help students with solving similar (near transfer) problems, and perhaps also far-transfer problems.

Post-practice reflection activities often involve some kind of dialogue between the student and another agent (teacher, peer, or computer tutor).

Examples

Here is a sample Reflective Dialogue, incorporated within the Andes physics tutoring system (VanLehn et al., 2005):

An example of a Post-Practice Reflective Dialogue

ANDES PROBLEM ROTS4A: A 5.00 kg ball is attached to a 2.00 m rope which will break if the tension exceeds 100 N. If the ball is made to swing in a vertical circle, what is the maximum velocity with which the ball can pass through the lowest point?     TUTOR: Which major principle did you need to solve the problem? [Just the name, please]     STUDENT: Newton's 2nd law     TUTOR: Yes. The main difference between this problem and most of the previous N2L problems is the fact that the direction of acceleration is __________. (fill in the blank)     STUDENT: centripetal