Microgenetic Studies of Self-Explanation

By Robert S. Siegler. 2002

309 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Microgenetic methods are useful for many purposes. They can yield more precise descriptions of cognitive change than would otherwise be possible, can reveal both similarities and dissimilarities in change processes across tasks and age groups, and can provide the type of detailed data that are essential for constructing formal models of cognitive change. Further, as is amply demonstrated in this volume, they are useful for examining change involving a wide variety of tasks and age groups and for addressing a wide variety of theoretical issues. In the present chapter, I pursue two main goals, one quite general and one relatively specific. The more general goal is to describe a theory of cognitive change – the overlapping waves approach – that has arisen from my own and other investigators' microgenetic studies. The more specific goal is to illustrate a use to which the microgenetic method is just beginning to be put, but one that it can serve very effectively: Helping us understand how instructional approaches exercise their effects. The particular instructional approach used to illustrate this function is encouragement to generate self-explanations, that is, encouragement to explain how or why events occurred. I first describe the general theory, then the specific application. Overlapping waves theory Implicit metaphors shape our thinking about many topics. A common implicit metaphor underlying traditional views of cognitive development was made explicit by the title of Robbie Case's (1992) book The mind's staircase .

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c79325da4c12e53a86967061b27f5e4915c091f6

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Citations in the corpus

Using Microgenetic Designs to Study Change Processes (2008, unknown): “, Ruhland & van Geert, 1998), social writing ( Jones, 1998), attention (Miller & Aloise-Young, 1996), memory (Coyle & Bjorklund, 1997), young children’s problem-solving strategies (Chen & Siegler, 2000), and the effects of instructional procedures (Siegler, 2002).”
Supported Self-Explaining during Fraction Intervention. (2015, methodology): “Siegler and Ramani (2009) showed that a linear game board maps more effectively than a circular game board to the linear mental”
Children's Learning (2009, background): “…27 2-5 Southern Region....................................................................................... 29 2-6 Western Region........................................................................................ 31”
Peer reviewers learn from giving comments (2011, background): “This finding is consistent with previous research showing that students can learn by explaining wrong (or weak) examples (Braaksma et al. 2002; Gick and McGarry 1992; Siegler 2002).”
No Explainability without Accountability: An Empirical Study of Explanations and Feedback in Interactive ML (2020, background): “Based on human behavior [59], we also hypothesize that explanations might suggest a model is being introspective and could therefore learn from its mistakes.”
Creative Learning: A Fresh Look (2016, methodology): “Researchers have successfully used such techniques to uncover the more tacit and microgenetic processes (intrapsychological) along with the more explicit and observable (interpsychological) features of teaching and learning (see Beghetto, 2013a; Siegler, 2002, 2006).”
Seeking the General Explanation: A Test of Inductive Activities for Learning and Transfer. (2015, background): “Transfer has been broadly linked to the process of explaining (Chi, Bassok, Lewis, Reimann, & Glaser, 1989; Ryoo & Linn, 2014; Siegler, 1995, 2002).”
Productive Failure in Learning Math (2014, background): “As argued earlier, such comparisons may also increase the likelihood of PF students selecting correct procedures and features over incorrect ones (Durkin & Rittle-Johnson, 2012; Siegler, 2002).”
Microgenetic Analyses of Learning (2007, background): “This tendency for understanding of causal relations to be especially important on transfer problems has also appeared in laboratory studies of other tasks (Alibali, 1999; Crowley & Siegler, 1999; RittleJohnson & Alibali, 1999; Siegler, 2002).”
The Instrumental Value of Explanations (2011, background): “Effects of explanation have been shown to accelerate difficult conceptual transitions in childhood, including an understanding of numerical conservation (Siegler 2002) and acquisition of false belief understanding in theory of mind (Wellman and Lagattuta 2004; Amsterlaw and Wellman 2006).”
Promoting transfer: effects of self-explanation and direct instruction. (2006, background): “, selfexplanation) is one promising process that can promote transfer (e.g., Chi, Bassok, Lewis, Reimann, & Glaser, 1989; Siegler, 2002).”
Inducing Self-Explanation: a Meta-Analysis (2018, unknown): “It has often been observed that students learn steps in a procedure without understanding how each step relates to others or contributes to the goal of the procedure (Siegler 2002).”
Finding new facts; thinking new thoughts. (2012, background): “…fact that explaining something to oneself can affect learning and discovery, even in the absence of new data (Amsterlaw & Wellman, 2006; Chi, Bassok, Lewis, Reimann, & Glaser, 1989; Chi, de Leeuw, Chiu, & LaVancher, 1994; Roscoe & Chi, 2007, 2008; Siegler, 2002; Williams & Lombrozo, 2009).”
The Social Brain, Language, and Goal-Directed Collective Thinking: A Social Conception of Cognition and Its Implications for Understanding How We Think, Teach, and Learn (2013, background): “…dialogic technique: “The results indicated that, as hypothesised, encouraging children to explain the reasoning underlying the experimenter’s answer resulted in their learning more than feedback alone or feedback in combination with requests to explain their own reasoning” (Siegler, 2002, p. 40).”
Design-Based Research Within the Constraints of Practice: AlgebraByExample (2015, background): “They are less likely to acquire or maintain misconceptions because they have identified what is wrong, and explained why it is wrong (Ohlsson, 1996; Siegler, 2002).”