It is better to ask a student to see if they can explain something to themselves, than for a teacher or book to always explain it to them. That’s according to a new meta-analysis of the findings from 64 prior studies involving nearly 6000 participants that compared learning outcomes from prompted self-explanation compared to instructor explanation, or compared to time spent using other study techniques such as taking notes, summarising, thinking out loud (without the reflection and elaboration involved in self-explanation), or solving more problems.

“It has often been observed that students learn steps in a procedure without understanding how each step relates to others or contributes to the goal of the procedure … Consequently, learners are less able to transfer the procedure to tasks with differing conditions.”

“…more successful learners tended to self-explain either by predicting the next step in a problem solution (anticipative reasoning) or identifying the overall goal structure of the problem and the purpose of its subgoals (principle-based explaining).”

In tennis, it means that one player with adequate skills to play a match makes errors because he or she is not able to elaborate the anticipative reasoning to use his/her skills in a specific match situation or doesn’t understand the next shot is a sub-goal of the main goal that is the game management. Therefore, the player need to integrate the tennis competences into a personal learning system to fulfill the match requests and self-explanation become a successful learning technique to develop the anticipative strategy.

Bisra, K., Liu, Q., Nesbit, J.C., Salimi, F., e Winne, P.H. (2018). Inducing self-explanation: A meta-analysis. Educational Psychology Review, 30, 703-725.