9 Explanations for Wrong Answers

Faculty spend a great deal of time marking student assignments and offering feedback.   Errors in both assessments and evaluations can offer great learning when students read that feedback or follow-up on their errors, but many students won’t directly approach instructors to ask questions to help them understand their answers. If unresolved, students may retain their misconceptions, impeding their ability to acquire further knowledge on it later and hindering their future learning.

Activity Steps

• Return work to students with errors noted and feedback that indicates where more learning is needed
• Direct students to ask Generative AI for explanations as to why their answer was incorrect
• Have students review those explanations and reiterate them in a way that shows their learning.
• Review their new explanations to see if they have now understood the concepts

Considerations

• This activity will assist students in learning from their errors, but may not be useful as a group activity.
• If you wish to use this as a group activity, consider bringing errors from past classes to give to the students to identify
  • In this case this activity could be used pre-evaluation to ensure that students are ready.
• The debrief of this activity is key to making sure the students come away with an accurate picture of what you want them to learn.
• Instructors could also consider allowing students to carry out this activity and report back on what they learned as a way to earn lost points on an assessment.
• Please refer to cautions in the Introduction that apply to all activities using Generative AI.