Self Explanation - Electric Fields - USNA - Spring 2006

Theory Wiki:
http://www.learnlab.org/research/wiki/index.php/Hausmann_Study

This in vivo experiment compared the learning that results from either hearing an explanation (instructional explanation) or generating it oneself (self-explanation). Students studied physics examples, which were presented step-by-step. For half the students, the example steps were incompletely justified (i.e., the explanations connecting some steps were missing) whereas for the other half, the example steps were completely justified. Crossed with this variable was an attempted manipulation of the student.s studying strategy. Half the students were instructed and prompted to self-explain at the end of each step, while the other half were prompted to paraphrase it. Paraphrasing was selected as the contrasting study strategy because earlier work has shown that paraphrasing suppresses self-explanation.