Self-explanation promotes transfer of general patterns but can reduce recall of details and cause overgeneralization¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study (2 entries) · review r2 · q2
Currency · newest study 2017 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i? Prompting self-explanation improves transfer of general patterns to new tasks but reduces recall of item details, as shown in preschool causal-reasoning and adult category-learning experiments. → Bethany Rittle-Johnson & Abbey M. Loehr 2017 q2 i? Self-explanation prompts caused learners to overlook exceptions to probabilistic category rules, applying the general rule even to conflicting instances. → Bethany Rittle-Johnson & Abbey M. Loehr 2017 (2)

Evidence¶

Bethany Rittle-Johnson & Abbey M. Loehr 2017¶

Bethany Rittle-Johnson & Abbey M. Loehr. (2017). Eliciting explanations: Constraints on when self-explanation aids learning. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 24, 1501–1510. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-016-1079-5

q2 · i? · review · r2

The review reports the Legare & Lombrozo (2014) experiment in which preschool children were prompted to self-explain on a causal reasoning task or observed without prompting. Self-explainers showed "poorer recall of details" alongside better transfer of the causal mechanism.

"Children in the self-explanation condition had poorer recall of details, such as the color of the objects, but better transfer of the causal mechanism to a new task."

Bethany Rittle-Johnson & Abbey M. Loehr 2017 (2)¶

Bethany Rittle-Johnson & Abbey M. Loehr. (2017). Eliciting explanations: Constraints on when self-explanation aids learning. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 24, 1501–1510. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-016-1079-5

q2 · i? · review · r2

The review reports Williams et al. (2013) college-student experiments on learning categories of artifacts and person characteristics. Prompted explainers "had more difficulty learning to correctly categorize examples" violating the general rule and were more likely to ignore exceptions.

"People who were prompted to self-explain, rather than think aloud or prepare to explain later, had more difficulty learning to correctly categorize examples that did not follow the general category rule"

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Self-explanation beats unguided studying for equal time, but instructional explanations, problem solving and retrieval practice can be equally or more effective — the general claim this finding bears on, with the studies behind it
• Explanation prompts direct attention to targeted information and can reduce attention to other important information — related
• Prompting learners to self-explain, one generative strategy, improves learning by a moderate average amount; other generative activities are not tested by the evidence recorded here — a broader claim this one bears on
• Prompting learners to self-explain improves understanding and problem solving on immediate tests by a moderate average amount, with little evidence yet on delayed or classroom gains. — a broader claim this one bears on
• Elaborative Interrogation Improves Learning — related
• Instruction-tuning a student model on a single misconception overgeneralizes the error across problems and degrades correct-solving accuracy — related
• Interesting but irrelevant details can impair comprehension and transfer, with effects that vary with the material and the learner — related
• An irrelevance prompt eliminates the recall cost of seductive details, supporting the diversion explanation — related
• When refined prompts failed, novices overgeneralized and concluded LLMs could not detect anaphors, attributing failure to the model rather than to their prompting — related
• The RR model explains children's stubborn persistence with ineffective spelling strategies that the Overlapping Waves model could not account for — related