The effects of self‐explaining when learning with text or diagrams

Self‐explaining is an effective metacognitive strategy that can help learners develop deeper understanding of the material they study. This experiment explored if the format of material (i.e., text or diagrams) influences the self‐explanation effect. Twenty subjects were presented with information a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inCognitive science Vol. 27; no. 4; pp. 669 - 681
Main Authors Ainsworth, Shaaron, Th Loizou, Andrea
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published 10 Industrial Avenue, Mahwah, NJ 07430‐2262, USA Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc 01.07.2003
Subjects
Diagrammatic reasoning
Learning
Representations
Self‐explanation
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Summary:Self‐explaining is an effective metacognitive strategy that can help learners develop deeper understanding of the material they study. This experiment explored if the format of material (i.e., text or diagrams) influences the self‐explanation effect. Twenty subjects were presented with information about the human circulatory system and prompted to self‐explain; 10 received this information in text and 10 in diagrams. Results showed that students given diagrams performed significantly better on post‐tests than students given text. Diagrams students also generated significantly more self‐explanations that text students. Furthermore, the benefits of self‐explaining were much greater in the diagrams condition. To discover why diagrams can promote the self‐explanation effect, results are interpreted with reference to the multiple differences in the semantic, cognitive and affective properties of the texts and diagrams studied.
ISSN:0364-0213
1551-6709
DOI:10.1207/s15516709cog2704_5