Elaboration

Hey 👋

Hope you had a nice halloween (one of those rare yet valuable occasions where the community comes out en masse—let’s keep it alive). Today, more on effective thinking…

Big idea 🍉

Prompting students to externalise their thinking through activities such as talking, writing, or drawing can enhance learning. This works by focusing attention, strengthening encoding, and fostering clarity of thought.

During externalisation, if we prompt students to expand upon new ideas, integrate them with prior knowledge, or organise them in more meaningful ways, we can help them to deepen their understanding and better apply it to new situations.

This process, known as elaboration, often requires teacher guidance, as learners aren’t typically inclined to do it naturally. Examples of activities that foster elaboration include:

• Summarising: Reworking the main ideas in one’s own words to deepen comprehension → Rewrite the main points of photosynthesis in your own words, focusing on key stages like light absorption and glucose production.

• Explaining: Describing how ideas work, comparing examples, or predicting outcomes, either to others or oneself → Explain Newton's third law to a peer by describing how pushing against a wall results in an equal and opposite force.

• Visualising: Creating drawings, maps, or diagrams to illustrate key ideas and their connections → Create a flowchart to show the steps of cellular respiration, linking glucose breakdown to energy release and waste production.

• Enacting: Using movements to represent actions, concepts, or relationships → Conceptualise planetary orbits by physically modelling the solar system, walking in circles around a central ‘sun’, and representing different planets.

Some of these activities work better for certain content (eg. diagrams are great for spatial relations) and different age groups (eg. young children can often experience cognitive overload when mapping). And all of them work best when students have sufficient background knowledge, can hold new ideas in mind, and see the point of such exercises.

🎓 For more on the theory, check out this review of generative learning activities, and for a wonderfully practical exploration, see the Enser’s book on the topic.

Summary

• Elaboration activities can help students to deepen and better apply their understanding.

• We can foster this by getting students to summarise, explain, visualise, and enact.

• These activities work best when they are not cognitively overloading, and students have sufficient prior knowledge.

Little updates 🥕

• Study on variable retrieval → suggests that mixing up practice cues improves memory more than using the same cues, especially when practice is spaced (though learners often think using the same cues works better​).

• Paper on the role of constructive feedback → finds that feedback perceived as useful by students can increase their interest (although doesn’t necessarily have a positive impact on their immediate learning).

• Study exploring teacher judgments of student motivation → finds that teachers often over-rely on cues like gender and academic performance when memory-based judgments are required, suggesting a need for formative assessment methods to enhance sensitivity to more relevant motivational cues​.

• Plus: a bonus podcast convo (even though I’m currently on a podcast break) between Zach, Doug, Josh, and moi on our recent collab.

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