Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Several studies have found that learning is more effective when students explain examples to themselves. Although these studies show that learning and self-explanation co-occur, they do not reveal why. Three explanations have been proposed and computational models have been built for each. T h e gap-filling explanation is that self-explanation causes subjects to detect and hll gaps in their domain knowledge. T h e schema formation explanation is that self-explanation causes the learner to abstract general solution procedures and associate each with a general description of the problems it appUes to. T h e analogical enhancement explanation is that self- explanation cause a richer elaboration of the ex- ample, which facilitates later use of the example for analogical problem solving. W e claim that, in one study at least, gapfilling accounts for most of the self-explanation effect.