Teaching the science of learning

Elaboration involves connecting new information to pre-existing knowledge. Anderson (1983, p.285) made the following claim about elaboration: “One of the most potent manipulations that can be performed in terms of increasing a subject’s memory for material is to have the subject elaborate on the to-be-remembered material.” Postman (1976, p. 28) defined elaboration most parsimoniously as “additions to nominal input”, and Hirshman (2001, p. 4369) provided an elaboration on this definition (pun intended!), defining elaboration as “A conscious, intentional process that associates to-be-remembered information with other information in memory.” However, in practice, elaboration could mean many different things. The common thread in all the definitions is that elaboration involves adding features to an existing memory.

One possible instantiation of elaboration is thinking about information on a deeper level. The levels (or “depth”) of processing framework, proposed by Craik and Lockhart (1972), predicts that information will be remembered better if it is processed more deeply in terms of meaning, rather than shallowly in terms of form. The leves of processing framework has, however, received a number of criticisms (Craik, 2002). One major problem with this framework is that it is difficult to measure “depth”. And if we are not able to actually measure depth, then the argument can become circular: is it that something was remembered better because it was studied more deeply, or do we conclude that it must have been studied more deeply because it is remembered better? (See Lockhart & Craik, 1990, for further discussion of this issue).

Another mechanism by which elaboration can confer a benefit to learning is via improvement in organization (Bellezza, Cheesman, & Reddy, 1977; Mandler, 1979). By this view, elaboration involves making information more integrated and organized with existing knowledge structures. By connecting and integrating the to-be-learned information with other concepts in memory, students can increase the extent to which the ideas are organized in their minds, and this increased organization presumably facilitates the reconstruction of the past at the time of retrieval.

Elaboration is such a broad term and can include so many different techniques that it is hard to claim that elaboration will always help learning. There is, however, a specific technique under the umbrella of elaboration for which there is relatively strong evidence in terms of effectiveness (Dunlosky et al., 2013; Pashler et al., 2007). This technique is called elaborative interrogation, and involves students questioning the materials that they are studying (Pressley, McDaniel, Turnure, Wood, & Ahmad, 1987). More specifically, students using this technique would ask “how” and “why” questions about the concepts they are studying (see Fig. 4 for an example on the physics of flight). Then, crucially, students would try to answer these questions – either from their materials or, eventually, from memory (McDaniel & Donnelly, 1996). The process of figuring out the answer to the questions – with some amount of uncertainty (Overoye & Storm, 2015) – can help learning. When using this technique, however, it is important that students check their answers with their materials or with the teacher; when the content generated through elaborative interrogation is poor, it can actually hurt learning (Clinton, Alibali, & Nathan, 2016).

Students can also be encouraged to self-explain concepts to themselves while learning (Chi, De Leeuw, Chiu, & LaVancher, 1994). This might involve students simply saying out loud what steps they need to perform to solve an equation. Aleven and Koedinger (2002) conducted two classroom studies in which students were either prompted by a “cognitive tutor” to provide self-explanations during a problem-solving task or not, and found that the self-explanations led to improved performance. According to the authors, this approach could scale well to real classrooms. If possible and relevant, students could even perform actions alongside their self-explanations (Cohen, 1981; see also the enactment effect, Hainselin, Picard, Manolli, Vankerkore-Candas, & Bourdin, 2017). Instructors can scaffold students in these types of activities by providing self-explanation prompts throughout to-be-learned material (O’Neil et al., 2014). Ultimately, the greatest potential benefit of accurate self-explanation or elaboration is that the student will be able to transfer their knowledge to a new situation (Rittle-Johnson, 2006).

The technical term “elaborative interrogation” has not made it into the vernacular of educational bloggers (a search on https://educationechochamberuncut.wordpress.com, which consolidates over 3,000 UK-based teacher blogs, yielded zero results for that term). However, a few teachers have blogged about elaboration more generally (e.g., Hobbiss, 2016) and deep questioning specifically (e.g., Class Teaching, 2013), just without using the specific terminology. This strategy in particular may benefit from a more open dialog between researchers and teachers to facilitate the use of elaborative interrogation in the classroom and to address possible barriers to implementation. In terms of advancing the scientific understanding of elaborative interrogation in a classroom setting, it would be informative to conduct a larger-scale intervention to see whether having students elaborate during reading actually helps their understanding. It would also be useful to know whether the students really need to generate their own elaborative interrogation (“how” and “why”) questions, versus answering questions provided by others. How long should students persist to find the answers? When is the right time to have students engage in this task, given the levels of expertise required to do it well (Clinton et al., 2016)? Without knowing the answers to these questions, it may be too early for us to instruct teachers to use this technique in their classes. Finally, elaborative interrogation takes a long time. Is this time efficiently spent? Or, would it be better to have the students try to answer a few questions, pool their information as a class, and then move to practicing retrieval of the information?