- Verbally explaining a concept really does help you to better grasp it, according to work by psychologists at the University of California at Berkeley. That's because we all have an intuitive sense of what makes a thorough explanation, but we often neglect to generate one for ourselves. The query of an outsider forces us to replace our false feeling of understanding with actual reasoning.
- Given a collection of robot figurines of various shapes and sizes, students in the study who were asked to explain the group of robots were much more likely to discover the (rather subtle) common thread between the figurines than students who were asked merely to describe the group of robots.
- In the classroom, or in the course of our day-to-day lives, we often overlook deeper explanations in favor of mere observations, or even mistake the latter for the former. Being asked "why" forces us to reassess our knowledge.
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Why Explaining to Others Helps Us Understand | Teaching | LifesLittleMysteries.com
Why Explaining to Others Helps Us Understand | Teaching | LifesLittleMysteries.com
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