Via the as ever interesting BPS Research Digest blog I discovered a new study:

“Explaining a rule or concept to yourself forces you to think deeply about it. Plenty of studies have shown this has benefits, both in terms of improving the understanding of relevant concepts and aiding the skill or process in question. Unfortunately, as Katherine McEldoon and her colleagues argue in their new paper, most of these studies are flawed because they failed to control for the extra time spent on self-explanation.”

Sadly though:

“In terms of actual problem solving skill on mathematical equivalence items, the self-explanation group did not differ significantly from the other two conditions. The highest scores were actually achieved by the additional practice group.

Lastly the researchers looked at what’s known as “procedural transfer” – the ability of the children to apply themselves to new versions of the mathematical equivalence problems that involved subtraction and the blank being in different position. Here the researchers said the self-explanation group “performed somewhat better” than the other two groups. That is, their scores were higher, but the difference did not reach statistical significance – again possibly due to the samples being too small.”

Read the whole blog post here, this is the abstract of the research

BACKGROUND:

Self-explanation, or generating explanations to oneself in an attempt to make sense of new information, can promote learning. However, self-explaining takes time, and the learning benefits of this activity need to be rigorously evaluated against alternative uses of this time.

AIMS:

In the current study, we compared the effectiveness of self-explanation prompts to the effectiveness of solving additional practice problems (to equate for time on task) and to solving the same number of problems (to equate for problem-solving experience).

SAMPLE:

Participants were 69 children in grades 2-4.

METHODS:

Students completed a pre-test, brief intervention session, and a post- and retention test. The intervention focused on solving mathematical equivalence problems such as 3 + 4 + 8 = _ + 8. Students were randomly assigned to one of three intervention conditions: self-explain, additional-practice, or control.

RESULTS:

Compared to the control condition, self-explanation prompts promoted conceptual and procedural knowledge. Compared to the additional-practice condition, the benefits of self-explanation were more modest and only apparent on some subscales.

CONCLUSIONS:

The findings suggest that self-explanation prompts have some small unique learning benefits, but that greater attention needs to be paid to how much self-explanation offers advantages over alternative uses of time.