VanLehn, K., & Jones, R. M. (1993). What mediates the self-explanation effect? Knowledge gaps, schemas or analogies? In M. Polson (Ed.), Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1034-1039). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

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. The gap-filling explanation is that self-explanation causes subjects to detect and fill gaps in their domain knowledge. The 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 applies to. The analogical enhancement explanation is that self-explanation causes a richer elaboration of the example, which facilitates later use for the example for analogical problem solving. We claim that, in one study at least, gap filling accounts for most of the self-explanation effect.

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