EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY

Chapter 7, page 142

In the Reflection at the beginning of this chapter, some of the students did not engage in any
elaboration at all. Those students who did not elaborate tended to learn less than those who elaborated
more. You may find it helpful to go back to examine the Reflection and consider how each student is
elaborating the sentence being read.

Problem 7.4. Understanding students’ thinking: Elaborations

Now try your hand at evaluating students’ elaborations. Here are two middle

school students whose teacher has asked them to use the strategy of

elaboration in response to the text below. Does each response display

elaboration?

Text: Jackson was the first president to use the veto extensively. Earlier

presidents had used the veto very rarely, and only when they believed that a

bill that Congress had passed was unconstitutional. Jackson used the veto as

a weapon of policy.

Nate. “Earlier presidents didn’t use the veto much, but Jackson used it a lot.

Earlier presidents didn’t veto a bill unless they believed it was

unconstitutional. But Jackson was different.”

Julien. “Most presidents today use vetoes a lot, so it looks like Jackson

started something that has continued for almost 200 years.”

Response: Nate does not elaborate. This is a paraphrase, a lengthy one, but

still a paraphrase. There are no substantial ideas mentioned that were not

already in the original text. Julien does elaborate. He connects what he is

reading to his knowledge of contemporary presidencies.

Explaining. When explaining ideas to themselves, learners ask themselves “Why” questions about
material in the text, and then they try to answer these questions. For instance, as a student reads a
biographical sketch of Edgar Allan Poe, she could try to explain why Poe did the things he did in his life.
Or a student studying a worked mathematics problem could try to explain to himself why each step is
important in reaching a final solution. The study you read earlier in the chapter by Chi et al. (1989) about
physics learners showed that it is very important for physics learners to carefully explain to themselves why
each step in the example problems are taken. Effective learners explain things to themselves more than
ineffective learners do (Bielaczyc, Pirolli, & Brown, 1995; Roy & Chi, 2005).
To investigate whether explaining ideas in a text improves learning, the role of explanation among
students, cognitive psychologist Michelene Chi and her colleagues (1994) performed an experiment in
which eighth graders read a textbook passage on the circulatory system. Students participated individually.
Students in the no-explanation group read the text twice. Students in the explanation group read the text
once but paused after each sentence to explain aloud what the sentence meant. After reading the text in one
of these two ways, all students answered an extensive battery of questions about the circulatory system
before and after reading the text. These questions were divided into lower- level and higher-level questions.
The lower-level questions could be answered using information directly written in the text passages. The
higher-level questions required inferences that required a good understanding of the circulation system. The
researchers found that the students who explained the ideas learned more than those who only read the text
two times. The difference was especially large for the higher-level questions. In addition, the researchers