According to cognitive and educational psychology, asking questions about why something is true can help promote learning. It’s a learning technique formally called elaborative interrogation.

Elaborative-interrogation occurs when learners are prompted to generate an explanation for an explicitly stated fact.

Here’s an example of how it works.

In one of the earliest studies around elaborative-interrogation, undergraduate students were given a list of sentences describing the action of a particular man (e.g., “The hungry man got into the car”). In the elaborative-interrogation group, participants were prompted at each sentence to explain “Why did that particular man do that?” while participants in the second group were provided with an explanation for each sentence (e.g., “The hungry man got into the car to go to the restaurant”). The third group simply read each sentence.

In the final test where participants were cued to recall which man performed each action (e.g., “Who got in the car?”), the elaborative-interrogation group substantially outperformed the other two groups — with an accuracy of approximately 72% as compared with approximately 37% in each of the other two groups.

Pretty cool, right? But.. so what? At this point, you’re probably wondering two things a) why it works b) why it matters at all.

Why and how it works

Why did the students who used elaborative interrogation more effectively remember particular facts in the above study? The answer is actually pretty simple. Elaborative interrogation enhances learning by supporting integration of new information with existing prior knowledge.

During elaborative interrogation, learners activate schemata to help organize new information to facilitate the new retrieval. Facilitating retrieval then increases our likelihood of remembering (or recall).

However, this integration of new information is rendered useless if the student is unable to discriminate among related facts when identifying learned information. For example, if in the example above, the learner did not understand the difference between a “hungry” man vs. an “angry” man, then the ability to recall “the restaurant” as the reason the man got into the car would have been more difficult.

Most elaborative-interrogation prompts explicitly or implicitly ask learners to process both similarities and differences between related entities (e.g., why a fact would be true of one group versus other groups), and the learner must have the cognitive capability to understand these differences.

Higher prior knowledge permits the learner to generate more appropriate explanations for why facts are true. This explains why elaborative interrogation is especially effective among older students in college and high school rather than younger elementary school students below fourth grade.

In general, elaborative-interrogation effects are often larger when elaborations are precise rather than imprecise, when prior knowledge is higher rather than lower and when elaborations are self-generated rather than provided.

Why it matters…

Elaborative-interrogation effects are relatively robust across different kinds of factual material with different contents and across a wide age range. It’s also a great study technique since it’s time efficient and doesn’t require much training.

However, elaborative-interrogation has its limitations. Unfortunately, the efficacy of applying elaborative interrogation to material that is lengthier or more complex than fact lists has not been confirmed. It is also unclear how or if elaborative-interrogation effects persist across longer delays to benefit comprehension. For now, we only know that elaborative-interrogation effects have significant impact for associative memory tests administered after short delays.

So, keep calm and “ask why” on.

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This is part of a series produced by Fluensi to help students learn more effectively and efficiently. For more information, check out: Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques. (n.d.). from http://psi.sagepub.com/content/14/1/4.full.pdfhtml?ijkey=Z10jaVH/60XQM&keytype=ref&siteid=sppsi

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This article was written by Kristie Moy. Learn more about her at kristiemoy.me .