Encouraging students to explain their ideas when learning mathematics: A psychological perspective

Children’s self-explanations are answers to voiced why and how questions that attempt to make sense of new information for oneself. They often are not sophisticated or generalizable. Despite this, prompting children to generate explanations often improves their learning. After providing examples of children’s explanations, this article summarizes empirical evidence for the learning benefits of prompting people to generate explanations when learning mathematics. There is strong evidence that prompting learners to explain leads to greater conceptual knowledge, procedural knowledge and procedural transfer when knowledge is assessed immediately after the learning session; there is limited evidence for greater procedural transfer after a delay. Scaffolding high-quality explanations via training or structured responses, designing prompts to carefully balance attention to important content, prompting learners to explain correct information, and prompting learners to explain why incorrect information is incorrect when appropriate, increases the benefits of prompts to generate explanations.