To Teach by Concept or by Procedure? Making the Most of Self-Explanations

Self-explanation prompts (prompts that encourage students to give explicit explanations for the content they study) have emerged as a promising method for promoting learning, but questions remain about how to maximize their utility. The current experiments investigated how instruction on concepts versus procedures affected the quality of self-explanations and subsequent learning outcomes when solving math equivalence problems (e.g. 7+3+9=7+_). Second through fifth-grade children learned about these problems under conditions varying on whether they were instructed on concepts or procedures (Experiment 1) and whether or not they were prompted for self-explanation after conceptual instruction (Experiment 2). The conceptual instruction group generated higher quality explanations and showed greater gains in conceptual knowledge and similar gains in procedural knowledge when compared to the procedural instruction group. No differences were found for the self-explanation manipulation. The results suggest that, in some circumstances, conceptual instruction is more efficient than procedural instruction and can improve knowledge enough to make selfexplanation unnecessary.