While I haven't looked at this study in any detail, both as a reviewer and a reader I've seen a HUGE variety of garbage called "self-explanation prompts." My take is that researchers as well as teachers need clarity about what exactly explanation is, why it works, how to scaffold it.
I would say that the main thing you're doing is getting kids to understand a generalization. Learning from a worked example should look like, studying a specific example ---> using it to make a generalization --> applying the generalization to solve a specific problem.
Within that middle step, we're allowed to do anything that gets kids actively thinking about the generalization. So you could give it explicitly, and then ask them to summarize it; you can make it a multiple choice activity; a fill-in-the-blank activity; you can elicit student explanations; you can do turn-and-talk.
You COULD also just prompt kids on a computer screen "explain this to yourself" but understandably that will probably not be very effective.
While I haven't looked at this study in any detail, both as a reviewer and a reader I've seen a HUGE variety of garbage called "self-explanation prompts." My take is that researchers as well as teachers need clarity about what exactly explanation is, why it works, how to scaffold it.
If you had to give a bit of concise advice on how to do self-explanation well, what would it be?
I would say that the main thing you're doing is getting kids to understand a generalization. Learning from a worked example should look like, studying a specific example ---> using it to make a generalization --> applying the generalization to solve a specific problem.
Within that middle step, we're allowed to do anything that gets kids actively thinking about the generalization. So you could give it explicitly, and then ask them to summarize it; you can make it a multiple choice activity; a fill-in-the-blank activity; you can elicit student explanations; you can do turn-and-talk.
You COULD also just prompt kids on a computer screen "explain this to yourself" but understandably that will probably not be very effective.