To Help Children Learn Deeply, Ask Them To Explain
Sparks
reports on a symposium at the annual Association for Psychological
Science research meeting held late last month, where panelists discussed
how and when asking students for explanations can best enhance their
learning:“’Often students are able to say facts, but not able to understand the underlying mathematics concept, or transfer a problem in math to a similar problem in chemistry,’ said Joseph Jay Williams, a cognitive science and online education researcher at the University of California, Berkeley.
For example, a student asked to explain why 2 x 3 = 6 cannot simply memorize and parrot the answer, but must understand the underlying relationship between multiplication and addition, Williams said. Students who can verbally explain why they arrived at a particular answer have proved in prior studies to be more able to catch their own incorrect assumptions and generalize what they learn to other subjects.
‘We know generating explanations leads to better educational outcomes generally. When children explain events, they learn more than when just getting feedback about the accuracy of their predictions,’ said Cristine H. Legare, an assistant psychology professor and the director of the Cognition, Culture, and Development Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin.
In forthcoming research with UC-Berkeley, Ms. Legare brought in 96 children ages 3 to 5 and set before them a complex toy made up of colorful, interlocking gears with a crank on one end and a propeller on the other.
With half the children, the researchers asked each one, ‘Can you explain this to me?’ With the other half, they simply said, ‘Oh look, isn’t this interesting?’
The two groups of children focused on different things, researchers found. Children who were asked to observe noticed the colors of the toy, while those asked to explain focused on the chain of gears working on each other to eventually turn the propeller when the child turned the crank at the other end.
Children who had explained the toy were better at re-creating it and not being distracted by ornamental gears, and they were better able to transfer what they had learned about how gears work to new tasks.
The children who had observed the toy outperformed the children in the explanation group on a memory task focused on the toy’s colors.” (Read more here.)
Fascinating: asking children to explain rather than observe leads them to focus differently, act differently, and ultimately learn differently. Of course, there are situations in which observing is the skill we want to cultivate—but this research is a good reminder that being asked to explain (as opposed to listening to someone else’s explanation) is often a great way to promote deep learning.