Self-explanation versus question-answering: Differences in processing and effectiveness for learning complex conceptual knowledge

Alba Rubio

Eri Lectura, Universitat de València

Learning complex conceptual knowledge by reading expository texts (e.g., science texts) is a tough job because it requires understanding text ideas and elaborating on text information. To help students with these processes, teachers often ask students to answer questions after reading the text (question-answering, QA), or they ask students to self-explain key text sentences (self-explanations, SE). These two learning activities are inspired by different theoretical approaches on reading. Whereas QA inspires on task-oriented models of reading, which emphasize the use of relevant information for answering the questions, SE inspires on models of reading comprehension, which emphasize the construction of a coherent mental representation of the text. So far, no study has compared the students’ text processing and the effectiveness of these two learning activities, which has theoretical and applied interest in educational settings. Therefore, this dissertation includes three experimental studies to fill in this gap. The first two studies compare SE and QA in Secondary students, while Study 3 analyzes the effect of inserting the questions in the text in comparison to these two activities. Main findings suggest that QA and SE induced different processing, but no differences between the two learning activities were found in terms of effectiveness for learning. Although high-level questions guided students, even those with less prior knowledge, to make more elaborations than in SE, QA activity seems to constrain processing to information related to the task model of the question rather than understanding the text as a whole. On the contrary, SE encourages the construction of a coherent mental representation of the text depending on the student's prior knowledge. When questions were inserted in the text, students spent the rereading time more efficiently and elaborations were more accurate compared to QA and SE. This contributed to explaining why IQ was more effective for learning than QA and SE, at least in college students. Overall, this thesis sheds light on how these learning activities and the timing of questions influence the student's text processing and final learning of complex conceptual knowledge.