Day 21: Learning Technique 8: Elaboration

Today we discuss our learning technique #8, elaboration, or self-explaining, which is the process of actively trying to explain the topic you're learning in your own words. You will learn what this technique is, the science behind it, why you should use it, and finally how you can apply it to accelerate your learning.

Resources for this lesson:

• Transcripts
• Worksheet
• List of Scientific References

Summary

What is Elaboration?

Elaboration, or self-explaining, is the process of actively trying to explain the topic you're learning in your own words, which will broaden the associated set of links in your long term memory.

• During elaboration, you are explaining and describing ideas with as many details as possible, making connections between ideas, and relating your own experiences.

A specific method of elaboration is called elaborative interrogation. [1]

• Interrogation means to question. So in this process, you're asking yourself questions about how and why things work and then producing the answers to these questions from your mind

Why it matters: Explaining material in your own words is a great signal that you actually know AND understand the material.

What does the science say?

Elaboration invokes deep processing of the material by forming new associations and can also involve chunking and deliberate practice depending on the specific nature of the task.

• During the process, elaboration induces the generation effect [2], which is enhanced memory that results from retrieving or organizing information from long-term memory.

Teaching others will often induce this effect because the process of teaching another person requires you to process the information very deeply and organize it.

You can also induce this effect by explaining steps to solving problems and why you are doing them.

• In one experiment [3], students who explained their steps when solving logical reasoning questions scored 90% better on a later test.
• Students who didn't self explain their steps scored only 23%.

Why should you use it?

Asking yourself why and how questions will encourage you to produce you own explanations for the ideas you're learning and integrate new material with past information in your memory.

• By relating to older material, you more easily organize the new material, making it easier to recall in the future, according to research [4].

Elaboration encourages you to create relationships between different ideas, understanding how two ideas are both similar to one another and how are they are different from one another.

How do you use it?

To apply the elaborative technique:

1. When learning different subjects, concepts, or ideas, begin asking yourself questions about how these ideas work and why.
2. Try to actively recall the answers to those questions, putting the answers in your own words and using your own elaborative details.
3. Make connections between multiple ideas, explaining how they work together. A good way to do this as take two ideas and think about ways that they are similar and different
4. Then describe how the ideas you are studying apply to your own life experiences or memories.
5. As you go through your day, take notice of the things happening around you and make connections to the ideas you're learning about

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Activity

Use elaboration to explain the elaboration technique to someone else.

• Think about helping to answer questions like, why use elaboration? How does it work?
• Answer those questions and create an explanation without looking over your notes or going back and listening to this lesson.
• Once you create an explanation for yourself, then go ahead and check your notes. How accurate was it?
• If it was a little inaccurate, then maybe you need to revisit the material or look for another source about elaboration.

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Skill Lesson Mastered

Demonstrate mastery of the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson by applying it to the above activity. If, and only if, you have a full understanding and have mastered the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson, select the next lesson in the navigation.