Research School Network: Elaborative interrogation An easy-to-implement way of integrating new information with existing knowledge…with some caveats

Elaborative interrogation means that, when presented with factual information, students respond to ​‘why’ questions. Doing this helps them make links to existing knowledge. Look at this exchange:

Teacher: …and what happens to the ice?
Student: It melts.
Teacher: Why does an ice cube soon melt if you hold it in your hand?

The teacher’s ​‘why’ question prompts the students to think about heat transfer, to go beyond the fact that the ice will melt.

Let’s look at another example. A factual statement we might make about Macbeth is ​‘The witches plan to meet Macbeth after the battle.’ We can divide the statement into its subject (the witches) and its predicate (plan to meet Macbeth after the battle). A predicate is the part of a sentence or clause containing a verb and stating something about the subject – end of grammar lesson.

To use elaborative interrogation, we can either simply ask why, or rephrase the statement as a question: ​‘Why do the witches plan to meet Macbeth after the battle?‘

The point is that to answer the question, we are forced to clarify the relationship between the subject and the predicate: they plan to meet him after the battle because… Or: an ice cube held in the hand will soon melt because…

To compete this answer, we have to elaborate on or embellish the information we are given; we have to build on the information in the statement. Put another way, we are ​‘adding features to existing memory’. Weinstein et al (2018)

In contrast, a question like ​‘When do the witches plan to meet Macbeth?’ does not send us back to rummage through our existing knowledge in order to elaborate. The answer here is simple: they meet after the battle. In terms of knowledge, it’s a mic drop when what we want is a speech.

Two things might strike you about elaborative interrogation: it’s easy to implement, and it requires some prior knowledge. If a student is thinking ​‘what battle?’ or ​‘who’s Macbeth?’, then elaborative interrogation is not going to be effective.

Question:how would you turn these factual statements into elaborative interrogation questions?

- Ada Lovelace is often referred to as the first programmer.
- π is an irrational number.
- No one liked Joffrey.

For each one, what prior knowledge might a student need to answer a ​‘why’ question?


Research note:

Another feature of elaborative interrogation is that it is best suited to the embellishment of individual facts, or at least this is what the research has focused on. With longer or more complex information, it’s hard to phrase a useful ​‘why’ question. Take this passage for example:

It’s difficult to see how we might capture that in a single ​‘why’ question, although we could break it into smaller statements.

Can the teacher provide the elaboration for the students? Yes, but it’s more effective if the students do it themselves. However, this also means that their answers need checking.

Research note:

Elaborative interrogation is even more effective if it prompts processing of similarities and differences between related information. Asking ​‘why’ questions often entails this kind of thinking: ​‘most elaborative-interrogation prompts explicitly or implicitly invite processing of both similarities and differences between related entities (e.g., why a fact would be true of one province versus other provinces)’ Dunlosky et al. (2013)

To return to our Macbeth example, we could ask ​‘Why might the witches plan to meet Macbeth after rather than before the battle?’ to have their elaboration consider the two conditions.

Dunlosky et al (2013) rated elaborative interrogation as having ​‘moderate utility’. As mentioned, it’s easy to implement and not time-consuming, but it’s worth stressing that students need to be able to check their answers if they’re not to damage their learning. It’s also worth noting that it is ​‘effective in response to cued recall; less effective when not cued’. O’Reilly et al (1998)

What does this mean? That if the student is given a prompt like ​‘The witches plan to meet _____ after rather than before ___________ because…’, they will recall the answer and their related thinking. But with no prompt, this is less likely to be the case. This means that we should be cautious about using elaborative interrogation – by itself, it’s not a guarantee that new information will make its way to long-term memory.

References

O’Reilly, T., Symons, S. and MacLatchy-Gaudet, H. (1998). A Comparison of Self-Explanation and Elaborative Interrogation. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 23(4), pp.434 – 445.

Weinstein, Y., Madan, C. and Sumeracki, M. (2018). Teaching the science of learning. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 3(1).

Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K., Marsh, E., Nathan, M. and Willingham, D. (2013). Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), pp.4 – 58.

En.wikipedia.org. (2019). Coastal erosion. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/… [Accessed 22 Oct. 2019].

quotes, P. (2019). Professor Stephen Hawking: 13 of his most inspirational quotes. [online] Telegraph.co.uk. Available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ne… [Accessed 22 Oct. 2019].