Explain to who?!

Standardized exams frequently ask students to provide explanations.

And this is a good thing! Explanations are great for demonstrating complex understanding.

But in their natural environment, explanations are multiplayer exchanges:

A: “I don’t get it.”

B: “Here, let me explain it to you!”

[…]

B: “Got it?”

A: “Yeah!”

In contrast, exam explanations are single-player, and evaluated by a grader who:

• Already knows the material
• Has a lot of explanations to get through

As Scott Farrar put it, they ring false:

Exam: Explain how farming practices evolved in the fifteenth century.

Student: Explain to who?! You already know!

These explanations are almost never evaluated in authentic contexts. As a result, we should be suspicious of the evaluations themselves.

How might we fix this?

Q&A

Authentic explanation happens when the explainee:

• doesn’t understand
• wants to understand
• evaluates whether the explanation helps them understand

In this way, the best way to generate and evaluate authentic explanations is through a Q&A platform.

Many such platforms are available today, but few (none?) are used as the primary way for evaluating student learning.

For that to happen, some structure would have to be necessary; maybe students would be required to explain and be explained to X times per week.

A gamified version of this would look less like StackOverflow or Reddit (leaderboards & reputation systems), and more like Wikipedia or Yelp (celebrating top contributors and people who improve the platform in a variety of ways).

Role-play

Without a vibrant marketplace of authentic questioning and explaining, maybe the next best thing is faking it.

The ELI5 (explain it like I’m 5) subreddit is a good example. It’s a gentle reminder to avoid jargon, and a challenge to find the simplest explanation possible.

In “trade and grade” activities, teachers will print out essay rubrics and ask classmates to grade their peers as if they were exam graders.

And they’ll spice things up with character motivation: “Imagine you’re going to have to get through hundreds of these!”

I wonder how role-play might be extended beyond the grader. How might students practice explaining to:

• Someone from 100 years ago?
• Someone from Mars?
• Your hero?
• Your fiercest opponent?

Expose the process

If a grader is going to evaluate a multi-paragraph essay based on a rubric, might it make more sense for the student to organize their response directly in the rubric?

Test-takers would be sure they were properly answering the question, and graders would save a bit of time. Wouldn’t this make for a more authentic exchange?

Or would this compromise some of the explanatory magic?

And if it would, how does that magic get graded in the first place?