Best Practice

How versus why: Elaborative-interrogation in your teaching

The aim of elaborative-interrogation is to embed knowledge of facts in students' long-term memory based around teachers asking ‘how’ and ‘why’. Andrew Jones looks at the research and asks how we can do this effectively

Those of you who are parents might have been exasperated when your children were toddlers by the tsunami of “why” questions that your inquisitive bundles of joy asked.

However, despite not being trained teachers, perhaps they were onto something pedagogically – testing our understanding of the world through constant verbal interrogation (for an intriguing discussion on why young children do this, see Stevens, 2009).

 

What is elaborative-interrogation?

Like retrieval practice, the aim of elaborative-interrogation is to embed knowledge of facts in students' long-term memory. It builds on the concept of “generation”, which is used in strategies such as the “generation effect” and “generative learning” (see Jones, 2023; Esner, 2020, respectively).

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