“Children are quick to ask ‘why?’ and ‘how?’ when it comes to new things,” says Sarah Sparks in this Education Week article, “but research suggests elementary and preschool students learn more when teachers turn the questions back on them.” For example, with the equation 2 x 3 = 6, students who are asked to explain the underlying relationship between multiplication and addition will do better at generalizing to other problems and catching their own incorrect assumptions than students who simply memorize the algorithm.

            “We know generating explanations leads to better educational outcomes generally,” says Cristine Legare of the University of Texas/Austin. “When children explain events, they learn more than when just getting feedback about the accuracy of their predictions.” Legare and her colleagues showed 3-5-year-old children a complex toy with colorful, interlocking gears. A crank at one end turned a propeller at the other. One group of students was asked, “Can you explain this to me?” while another was asked, “Oh look, isn’t this interesting?” The first group focused on the chain of gears that turned the propeller, ignored the ornamental gears, and were able to transfer what they learned about gears to new situations. The second group did better on a memory task on the gears’ colors. “We can’t assume what we want to teach is something kids are just going to pick up on,” says Legare.

            Dedre Gentner at Northwestern University/Evanston performed a similar experiment with 3- and 7-year olds. Children were shown a picture of two turtles facing each other and told it was a toma. They were then shown a series of pictures of turtles, cats, and two cats facing each other and asked which was a toma. Almost all the 3-year olds picked the turtle, but most of the 7-year olds noticed the relationship and picked the picture of the two cats facing each other. But when 3-year olds were taught with several different pictures of animals facing each other and asked to explain them (“Can you say why both of these are tomas?”), they performed more like 7-year olds when asked to spot a toma.

“Student Explanations Can Drive Learning, Studies Say” by Sarah Sparks in Education Week, June 5, 2013 (Vol. 32, #33, p. 6), www.edweek.org

From the Marshall Memo #489